China Building City For Cloud Computing 142
CWmike writes "First it was China's 'big hole' sighting that brought us the supercomputing race. Now China is building a city-sized cloud computing and office complex that will include a mega data center, one of the projects fueling that country's double-digit growth in IT spending. The entire complex will cover some 6.2 million square feet, with the initial data center space accounting for approximately 646,000 square feet, says IBM, which is collaborating with a Chinese company to build it. A Sputnik moment? Patrick Thibodeau reports that these big projects, whether supercomputers or sprawling software development office parks, can garner a lot of attention. But China's overall level of IT spending, while growing rapidly, is only one-fifth that of the US."
1/5 of spending? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares about the absolute figure, anyway, it's the bang for the buck that's important. Soviet space program was cheaper than US one as well.
Just muscle politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Software is more important than hardware today. The whole cloud computing movement shows that in many cases hardware is just a cheap commodity. This datacenter is some politicians building themselves a monument and pretending to be ahead or at least on the same level with the west. This is just a lot of hot air, but otherwise quite irrelevant. Building a large datacenter is pretty easy, once you have the cash, and does not show any level of technological sophistication.
Re:How convient (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey look, I can store all my data on Chinese government owned computing equipment where they can read it at will and...
"I'd be a fool not to" use encryption.