A signing ceremony between Kuaishou and the Ulanqab government is held in Beijing on June 6. [Photo/wulanchabu.gov.cn]

Leading short video and livestreaming platform Kuaishou will invest 10 billion yuan ($1.41 billion) – in Ulanqab city in North China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region – to establish a big data center there, according to a report in the Inner Mongolia Daily.

A signing ceremony for Kuaishou and the Ulanqab government to mark the project was held at Kuaishou’s Beijing headquarters on June 6.

A Kuaishou spokesman said the Ulanqab big data center will be the first ultra-large-scale internet data center it has built – and it will also be the leading data center for big data artificial intelligence in China. 

The center has a planned area of 500 mu (or 33.33 hectares) and is designed to accommodate 300,000 servers. 

The spokesman said the platform continues to go from strength to strength. From the start of 2020, the daily user activity on Kuaishou exceeds 300 million and the demand for data processing is increasing at a rate of more than 10 petabytes per day, he added.

The Ulanqab center will support Kuaishou's storage needs over the next few years with 60 exabytes of storage capacity, equivalent to 3 million national libraries.

Kuaishou said the volume of the data center will be second only to China’s high-tech giant Tencent and e-commerce giant Alibaba in the industry.

It will be independently developed by the Kuaishou technical team, which will complete the overall concept design.

The date center will also use a large number of domestic chips, combining high performance and low power consumption.

The first batch of IT equipment in the data center is scheduled to go into operation by the end of 2021.