(Yicai Global) June 9 -- A listed unit of GCL Group Holdings, a Chinese renewables giant, will join hands with 99Cloud, an edge computing company, on digital transformation, which signals a change of heart in willingness to invest.

GCL Energy Technology inked an investment agreement with a subsidiary of 99Cloud, which builds and operates data centers, the Suzhou-based solar and wind power giant said in a statement today, without disclosing the scale of investment.

The partnership marks a shift in willingness to invest as this week GCL Energy said it will cancel a battery-grade lithium carbonate project, which it had been preparing for nearly a year, and lower its issuance of convertible bonds to about CNY2.65 billion (USD372 million) from an earlier plan of up to CNY4.5 billion.

An employee of the company said the fixed-asset investment adjustment was done based on market changes. After talking with regulators, the firm reassessed the relevance of the project to its main business. In the future, the company will continue to focus on the three major segments of clean energy, mobile energy, and lithium battery materials, the staffer added.

The clean energy firm has been deepening its digital prowess in the past years as in 2021 it announced the establishment of a related research institute.

GCL Energy has achieved an important start in the field of artificial intelligence-featured computing power, per Zhu Gongshan, chairman of GCL Group. This year, the unit has sold some of its thermoelectric assets to focus on digital energy, and allocated funding to an AI supercomputing center, among other measures, he added.

Last month, GCL Energy said it plans to build 15 data centers around the world by 2024 with a total investment exceeding CNY5 billion (USD702.1 million).

The company aims to maximize its power usage and the penetration rate of renewables via synergies between electricity and computing power to help build a new type of energy system, GCL Energy added.

The Shenzhen-traded shares of GCL Energy [SHE: 002015] fell 2.6 percent to close at CNY14.54 (USD2).

Editors: Shi Yi, Emmi Laine