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  5. Your Cloud Future Is In China: Page 2 of 4
Cloud Infrastructure

Your Cloud Future Is In China: Page 2 of 4

Can we expect that cloud hosting will be focused on China within 10 years? The infrastructure, the money, the central planning and their enviable access to resources make this inevitable. And why not? In the great marketing machine that surrounds cloud computing, the claim is that your data can be anywhere and that compute power should not be close to you, nor should you even care. And as China moves from agrarian subsistence to manufacturing and then onto a tertiary economy, it will be position
February 08, 2011

Chinese officials also have a plan to own all technology to manufacture their own nuclear plants and power technology for the second or third generation. While they depend on Western companies for most technology, it is believed that they are already learning and adapting the technologies to manufacture Chinese-made alternatives. This will decouple them from global dependency on delivery of new power capacity and increase the pace of change.

Urban Planning
No matter your personal opinion of the Chinese government, the strong central planning of the current political environment strongly favors the development of designated areas that are deliberately designed for data centers and IT services. This means that planning for power generation, population centers and commercial areas can be comprehensively developed from the ground up. Companies can choose to develop data centers in partnership with a political environment that can solve all practical problems .

The current fashion of American companies is to build data centers in unsuitable locations that make long-term security difficult. For example, building on top of earthquake-prone areas (San Francisco) or areas that have no proper access to resources (Las Vegas) or that are subject to water flooding (almost any part of the East Coast) will end when a natural disaster strikes. Europe has similar problems with land availability and environmental issues that are equally problematic.

China loves big. It is big, it has lots of people, it has lots of space, it has lots of resources. They love building big things and are proven able to execute on the largest projects. It's believable that they can build big data centers--no, massive data centers--and make them work as well as anyone else, if not better. Look at the Olympic games a few years back: big and successful.

Cheap and Better Educated Workforce
If you've ever worked with Chinese developers or IT staff, you'll quickly realize that they are smart, really smart. Some companies require job applicants to have an IQ above 140. And there are lots of smart people who cost a lot less than you do. The Chinese education system produces more mass tonnage of smart people than you can imagine.

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