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Shaping a Digital and Intelligent Qinghai with Advanced Technologies

Technologies like 5G, cloud, and AI are writing a new chapter of high-quality and green development

Qinghai Province in northwest China enjoys pleasant summers and abundant sunshine. Herds of cattle and goats stroll leisurely through grasslands that stretch as far as the eye can see, while the vast Qinghai Lake glitters like a jewel in the stunning landscape.

Intelligent Qinghai

Eco-friendly data centers, base stations, and optical cables powered by digital and intelligent applications transmit phone signals that never drop, with technologies like 5G, cloud, and AI driving a smart future for Qinghai. Industries such as high-speed telecommunications, solar energy, smart aquaculture, electric vehicles, and green data centers are thriving.

Intelligent Qinghai

Revitalizing tourism with connectivity

Summer is peak season for Erlangjian Scenic Spot, which sits beside Qinghai Lake. An average of more than 20,000 daily visitors used to pose frequent challenges for telecom networks, but, today, complaints about dropped signals and video lags are a thing of the past thanks to stable, smooth, and high-speed 5G.

By July 2024, China Mobile Hainan had installed 15 4G base stations and 8 5G base stations around the scenic spot. And with Huawei and other partners, the operator has deployed multi-band networks to accommodate the 2.6 GHz, 4.9 GHz, and 700 MHz bands.

Having doubled network capacity and ensured strong signals, many visitors and vloggers now use 5G for livestreaming local sights and scenery.

Intelligent Qinghai

A digital and intelligent management platform offers a variety of functions, including e-ticketing, real-time visitor flow and ticket analysis, and safety monitoring during peak times.

Intelligent Qinghai

Smart salmon farming in Yellow River

Longyangxia Dam is located in a vast reservoir covering about 383 km2; in the upper reaches of the Yellow River. Mainly fed by meltwater from the surrounding mountains, the water in the reservoir stays at around 12°C all year - the perfect temperature for salmon.

Intelligent Qinghai

Xia Siyuan from Longyang Fresh (Qinghai) is positive about the use of technology for salmon farming.

"High-tech can help us cultivate salmon in a smart way. Based on technologies like 5G, video monitoring, and big data analytics, we have built a radar system and an integrated biomass data monitoring platform for aquaculture. Now, we can monitor the number and growth of salmon in each cage in real time. China Mobile and Huawei have jointly built a 5G private network that enables remote inspection and feeding. This helps us boost production efficiency, reduce the workload of onsite workers, and avoid risks from working in extreme weather conditions."

The company yields huge volumes of high-quality salmon that sell well both inside and outside China, in turn creating many jobs for local people.

"Network coverage was a big challenge, as the aquaculture area was up to 12 km from the shore,” says Liu Haifeng from China Mobile Hainan. “It required ultra-long-distance coverage, but no such reference network architecture existed in the province. So, we established a special team with Huawei technical experts, and worked tirelessly on onsite surveys to develop feasible solutions. In 2023, we successfully built a 5G private network to provide secure connections for all intelligent aquaculture scenarios. We simply want to use 5G networks to help our customers develop high-quality aquaculture."

Solar farm: Every kWh counts

Located in Hainan Prefecture’s Talatan, Qinghai’s solar farm is a clean energy hub that boasts the world's largest installed capacity and the world’s largest hydro-solar hybrid power station.

Holding two Guinness World Records, the solar farm has transformed the Gobi Desert. Herds of goats can be seen grazing leisurely under PV panels as technology and nature work in unison. By sheltering the ground below, the PV panels reduce soil temperature, evaporation, and wind erosion. This creates fertile ground for solar grazing and demonstrates a best-practice use case of developing an eco-friendly economy.

Covering 54 km2, the solar farm is just one quarter of the PV business of Huanghe Hydropower Development in Hainan Prefecture. The company’s PV power stations have a total installed capacity of 10.7199 million KW, making it the largest PV power station operator in the world. Responsible for multiple benchmark projects, including the Hainan 100 MW PV testing base, Hainan multi-energy integration demo zone, and the Hainan UHV electricity transmission base, Huanghe Hydropower Development has emerged as a global leader in PV power generation and operations.

China Mobile Hainan has already built 43 base stations across the farm, including 13 5G base stations in key areas. It has also deployed integrated networks on the 2.6 GHz and 700 MHz frequency bands. Additional private 5G networks will be deployed to drive digital and intelligent applications such as drone inspections, supporting the development of the solar farm as a leading clean energy base.

  • 43

    base stations

  • 13

    5G base stations

Cloud, networks, and devices work together to efficiently generate power and simplify O&M, with Huawei’s smart PV inverters converting the electricity generated by each panel from DC into AC.

Ultra-fast charging for green travel

Many new-energy vehicles can be seen on the highway stretching across the vast Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Thanks to its commitment to clean energy, Qinghai has deployed many charging stations for electric vehicles in its capital, Xining.

The ultra-fast charging station in Xining’s Chengbei Bus Station, for example, uses Huawei's liquid-cooled ultra-fast charging equipment to charge up to 40 vehicles simultaneously. Powered by cutting-edge technologies, the equipment eliminates range anxiety for drivers.

Intelligent Qinghai

The plateau’s largest data center

For functions like monitoring deliveries in real time and route planning for autonomous vehicles, where does Qinghai's computing power come from?

China Mobile's data center, situated on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the first of its kind and the largest on the plateau.

Intelligent Qinghai

Leveraging natural advantages such as green power and a cold climate, the data center delivers computing power, networks, and AI models to Internet customers across China. Enabled by all-optical high-quality computing networks powered by optical cross-connect (OXC) technology, the data center also provides customized AI-enabled services for industries across the province. Fast, intelligent, secure, and net zero, it represents the next generation of green data centers and supports the national east-to-west computing resource transfer project.

China Mobile's big data center features 7 KW, 10 KW, and 12 KW high-power cabinets, with Chinese-made GPUs yielding 300 PFLOPS of computing power. The data center provides intelligent computing services for over 300 customers in fields such as government services, smart healthcare, and smart cities, contributing to socioeconomic development across the province.

Intelligent Qinghai

Today, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is developing rapidly, with smooth high-speed communications networks, green electricity, and green computing power driving a new era of innovation for industries.

China Mobile, Huawei, and other partners are committed to developing digital solutions to support four industries in Qinghai: salt, clean energy, ecotourism, and organic agricultural and animal husbandry product exports.

Both companies will also help rural communities keep pace with the increasingly digital world.

Intelligent Qinghai

Aligned with the UN SDGs and Huawei's vision and mission, Huawei’s long-term digital inclusion initiative TECH4ALL focuses on four domains: education, environment, health, and development. To enable an inclusive and digital world, Huawei will continue working with partners to revitalize rural areas and drive high-quality development through technologies such as 5G, cloud, and AI.

In terms of O&M, the Smart I-V Curve Diagnosis technology enables the system to complete full remote detection in just 15 minutes. In addition, digital technologies have significantly improved the O&M efficiency of utility-scale PV plants.Lin Zhiqiang and Li Chongzhi,
Maintenance and inspection engineers from Huanghe Hydropower Development Hainan Branch

By taking advantage of the plateau's natural sunshine, China Mobile's data center on the plateau utilizes 100% clean energy and has achieved a PUE of 1.14. The center's dedicated, rooftop, distributed PV plant is equipped with 240 pieces of 540 WP PV panels. The plant possesses an installed capacity of 129.6 kWp, with an estimated energy yield of 158,000 kWh each year. The electricity generated by the plant is basically enough to power auxiliary devices, street lamps, and office buildings within the data center campus. Ma Hongbin,
Director of the Computing Power Subsidiary of China Mobile Qinghai