According to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the size of China's data center market grew from RMB 21.03 billion in 2013 to RMB 149.42 billion in 2020. This indicates that China's digital development is becoming a core driving force for national competition in the era of global digital transformation. As an important infrastructure for digital development, data centers have entered a new stage.

At the beginning of 2023, new data centers will bring a fresh perspective to various industries through technologies such as 5G, industrial Internet, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. In 2023, data centers will face more opportunities and challenges, as well as some new trends. According to the "Three-Year Action Plan for the Development of New Data Centers (2021-2023)" released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, we can analyze the following aspects:

First, cloud computing and edge computing will further merge. Edge computing can reduce the need for remote centralized analysis and decision-making, thereby reducing latency and bandwidth limitations. Compared with the traditional cloud computing model, edge computing model has advantages of real-time data processing and analysis, high security, privacy protection, strong scalability, location awareness, and low traffic. In the future, edge computing will develop in synergy with cloud computing, forming a complementary relationship. Edge data centers are data centers deployed closer to where data is generated and consumed, and they can provide faster, lower-latency, and more efficient services. Obviously, edge data centers are moving to the forefront. In the 5G era, the user end will form an extremely tight cloud-edge-end architecture with cloud data centers and edge data centers.

Second, the automation level of data analysis and mining will increase. It is well-known that applications such as ChatCPT, Dall-E, Lensa AI, and GitHub Copilot enable computers to use machine learning algorithms to generate content such as text, images, audio, video, and code. These new faces demonstrated at the beginning of 2023 are accelerating the further development of artificial intelligence. The impact of artificial intelligence on the data center industry is multi-faceted, including improving data center management, productivity, and infrastructure, reducing energy consumption and costs, and increasing computing power and service quality. With the development of artificial intelligence, the requirements for data centers include high throughput, high reliability, low latency, server virtualization adaptation, green and low carbon, and other requirements, which are directly driving the comprehensive update of data centers.

Third, visualization and interactive data analysis will become more popular. Visualization tools can make complex and diverse data easier to understand, present, and explain, while interactive data analysis tools can make it easier for users to discover useful information from the data. This will make enterprises pay more attention to user experience, thereby helping them better understand data, improve data analysis efficiency and accuracy.

Fourth, data governance and privacy protection will receive more attention. In the context of the globalization of data, information security will become the top priority for both national and corporate strategies. As artificial intelligence continues to develop, information security also faces challenges, such as how to achieve attack protection, upgrade backups, find and fix bugs, use script tools, ensure data security, conduct service inspections, and ensure the security of data centers, which is a massive system. With the emergence of new forms of the internet and the continuous improvement of hacking techniques, security will increasingly become one of the most important issues for all data centers.

Fifth, the problem of greening the infrastructure of data center construction is imminent. Data centers require a large amount of electricity to maintain the operation of servers, storage devices, backup devices, cooling systems, and other infrastructure, and energy consumption and carbon emissions are growing rapidly. China's "carbon peak before 2030" and "carbon neutrality before 2060" are daunting tasks. How to achieve green, low-carbon, and high-quality development is a challenge for data centers.

In 2023, digital development will be elevated to the national level, accompanied by the accelerating global trend of dataization. Under the guidance of national policies, the data center industry will accelerate its development towards intensification, greenification, and efficiency. As an important infrastructure of the digital economy and the core force driving informationization and intelligent development, data centers serve as the hub for data and the core of computing power. They will fully support China in becoming a world data power.