The Chinese province of Gansu says that it will “strictly prohibit crypto mining” in the server rooms for China’s mega digital Eastern Data and Western Computing infrastructure project, according to a policy document.
See related article: GBA among regions for China’s blockchain-powered data hubs
Fast facts
- The Eastern Data and Western Computing project aims to build data centers in the western part of China to store, compute and feed data collected from the more prosperous eastern regions of China. The western part of China has a relatively slow economy, but cool weather and cheap electricity.
- Qingyang, a city in Gansu province, is designed to be one of the hubs of the project. It is deploying a data center and plans to have more than 300,000 units of server racks (a rack is a kind of server, also a unit to count the number of the server) by 2025.
- Some state-owned entities in China were found to have mining rigs operating last year after the crypto ban, such as in Zhejiang province and Jiangsu province.
- It has been a year since China banned cryptocurrency, but in May 2022, China had re-emerged as the second-largest source of Bitcoin mining, suggesting that mining farms could still be secretly running.
See related article: China’s Zhejiang busts state-owned entities on mining crypto