Guangdong province to build large data centre

The provincial government of Guangdong has announced plans to build a regional data centre, to support the ‘orderly circulation’ of data in the area.

The city government of Shenzhen, a technology hub, has been tasked with building a large data centre to support the Guangdong data plan.

The government is looking to not only organize the circulation of data throughout the region, but it also plans to create a ‘data custom’. This will be responsible for reviewing, evaluating, and regulating the flow of data across international borders.

A combination of efforts will help to strengthen data oversight and provide real-world evidence to support additional legislation to govern the digital economy and data transactions in China.

The efforts of Guangdong will be supported by local city governments in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Zhuhai as well as the Cyberspace Administration of China’s Guangdong arm. The data centre, as well as the ‘data custom’, will cover the local area including the cities of Hong Kong and Macau.

A data trading market will also be established in Shenzhen. Recently, the Chinese government issued a plan to establish a market for trading data, like stocks or bonds. However, the plan did not include a number of specifics that would be of interest to stakeholders, including who owns data or what kind of data would be available to trade on the market.

All of these efforts reflect the Chinese government’s interest in utilizing data management as an economic resource for China. Since last spring, data has been considered a factor of production in China, along with land, labour and capital.

This announcement is timed to coincide with recent data regulations in China. These include the Data Security Law and Personal Information Protection Law, which govern data collection and data storage.

Companies with large amounts of user data will also be subject to a pre-IPO review, assessing businesses as potential national security risks based on the “risk of supply chain interruption due to political, diplomatic, trade, and other factors.”