(Yicai) April 15 -- A city in the Gobi Desert in China's northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has signed CNY14.4 billion (USD2 billion) worth of computing infrastructure projects at an investment promotion event.

Karamay inked investment agreements with 36 partners, including government departments, enterprises, and research institutes, to build intelligent computing facilities with a total computing power of 68,000 peta-floating point operations per second to provide low-cost computing power to Chinese eastern regions, Yicai learned at the event held in Shanghai yesterday.

In recent years, China has developed computing infrastructure in western regions, where land and energy resources are abundant, to meet the growing demand from developed eastern regions. As a result, Karamay established computing power cooperation with all of China’s first-tier cities: Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.

Karamay has built six data centers with 60,000 standard cabinets, a total storage capacity of 6,200 petabytes, and an intelligent computing power of 17,000 PFLOP, becoming a vital industry highland of computing power in western China, Shi Gang, secretary of the Karamay Municipal Party Committee, said at the event.

Karamay has excellent natural resources for the computing power industry, with more than 1,280 square kilometers of land that can be developed for wind and solar power. Its installed new energy generation capacity is expected to exceed 10 million kilowatts this year, providing low-cost green power for data centers.

Karamay's annual average temperature is between 5°C and 14°C, with dry weather and scarce rain, which can provide stable and free natural cooling for data centers. Its geology is also stable, as no earthquake with a magnitude of over 4.7 has ever been recorded there.

This year, Karamay aims to boost its intelligent computing power to more than 100,000 PFLOP, according to the city's plan.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Futura Costaglione