The connotation, evolution and development significance of new infrastructure construction



I. Connotation of new infrastructure

According to the spirit of the documents of relevant state departments and expert interpretation, the new infrastructure includes seven areas, such as 5G base station construction, ultra-high voltage, intercity high-speed railway and urban rail transit, new energy vehicle charging piles, big data centers, artificial intelligence, and industrial Internet.

New infrastructure, defined by the relevant state departments, is guided by the new development concept, driven by technological innovation, based on information networks, the use of new scientific and technological revolution achievements, for high-quality development needs, to provide digital transformation, intelligent upgrading, integrated innovation and other services infrastructure construction, is the national, local and relevant departments investment growth in recent years. That is, new infrastructure is the national infrastructure construction or infrastructure construction to establish a modern economic system, and is an important way for economic development to be high-quality, ecological, digital, intelligent, and the transformation of old and new growth drivers.

With the technological revolution and industrial change, the connotation and extension of new infrastructure are advancing with The Times, rather than unchanged, and need to be continuously tracked and studied. On April 20, 2020, the relevant personnel of the National Development and Reform Commission gave three main aspects of the new infrastructure:

The first is information infrastructure, which mainly refers to the infrastructure evolved based on the new generation of information technology, such as the communication network infrastructure represented by 5G, the Internet of Things, the industrial Internet, and the satellite Internet, the new technology infrastructure represented by artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and blockchain, and the computing power infrastructure represented by data centers and intelligent computing centers.

The second is integrated infrastructure, which mainly refers to the in-depth application of Internet, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies to support the transformation and upgrading of traditional infrastructure, such as intelligent transportation infrastructure and smart energy infrastructure.

The third is innovation infrastructure, which mainly refers to the infrastructure that supports scientific research, technological development, and product development with public benefit properties, such as major scientific and technological infrastructure, science and education infrastructure, and industrial technological innovation infrastructure.

These are the three aspects of what people often call new infrastructure.

Some have expanded the seven areas of new infrastructure to include, Green disaster prevention and public health service efficiency system construction, 5G-Internet - cloud computing - blockchain - Internet of Things infrastructure construction, artificial intelligence big data center infrastructure construction, industrial Internet infrastructure construction centered on the big health industry, new urbanization infrastructure construction, emerging technology industry incubation and upgrading infrastructure construction, etc. It is innovative, integrated, comprehensive, systematic, basic and dynamic.

Second, the proposal of new infrastructure and its evolution

Overall, the new infrastructure has not been proposed for a long time, a total of less than five years. In other words, new infrastructure is still a relatively new concept. By referring to the existing literature, we can find the context of the proposal and evolution of the new infrastructure.

1. At the national level

From December 19 to 21, 2018, the Central Economic Work Conference put forward the requirements for new infrastructure construction, defining 5G, artificial intelligence, industrial Internet, and the Internet of Things as "new infrastructure construction". It can be said that this is the first time that the "new infrastructure" has been mentioned at the central level.

"Strengthening the construction of a new generation of information infrastructure" was included in the 2019 Government Work report.

On July 30, 2019, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee held a meeting and put forward the requirement of "accelerating the construction of new infrastructure such as information networks".

On January 3, 2020, when the executive meeting of The State Council determined measures to promote the steady growth of the manufacturing industry, it proposed to "vigorously develop advanced manufacturing, introduce new infrastructure investment support policies such as information networks, and promote intelligent and green manufacturing." New infrastructures related to information networks are highlighted here.

On February 14, 2020, the 12th meeting of the Commission for Deepening Overall Reform of the CPC Central Committee pointed out that "infrastructure is an important support for economic and social development, and it is necessary to take overall optimization and coordinated integration as the guidance, balance the development of stock and increase, traditional and new infrastructure, and build an intensive, efficient, affordable, smart, green, safe and reliable modern infrastructure system." The characteristics and general requirements of the new infrastructure are defined here.

On March 4, 2020, the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee held a meeting, stressing that "we should increase investment in public health services and emergency material support, and accelerate the construction of new infrastructure such as 5G networks and data centers." Here, the types of new infrastructure such as 5G networks and data centers are emphasized.

On March 6, 2020, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology held a special meeting to accelerate the development of 5G, requiring the acceleration of the construction of new infrastructure. The importance of 5G is highlighted here.

On April 20, 2020, Wu Hao, Director of the Department of Innovation and High-tech Development of the National Development and Reform Commission, said at the press conference of the National Development and Reform Commission that the new infrastructure includes three aspects: information infrastructure, integration infrastructure and innovation infrastructure, and the specific content has been listed earlier.

In June 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission clarified the broad connotation of new infrastructure, including the goal of "taking the new development concept as the premise, driven by technological innovation, based on information networks, and facing the needs of high-quality development, to create an industrial upgrading, integration, and innovation infrastructure system". This passage can be interpreted as an official statement.

On August 6, 2020, the Ministry of Transport issued the Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Construction of New Infrastructure in the Field of Transportation, which set the goal of achieving remarkable results in the construction of new infrastructure in the field of transportation by 2035, and gradually applying intelligent trains, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent ships.

The Guidelines require deepening the application of highway electronic toll collection system (ETC) gantry, and enriching the application scenarios of vehicle-road collaboration. Development of intelligent high-speed EMUs. We will build infrastructure for geographical information mapping of waterways and meteorological and hydrological monitoring of navigational waters. Promote the interconnection and sharing of core data between airports and airlines, air traffic control, operation support and supervision units, and realize global aircraft tracking. We will build a big data center for postal services, and carry out pilot applications of new mailing address codes. We will guide the construction of ultra-fast charging and high-power electric vehicle charging facilities in key expressway service areas such as city clusters.

The guidelines also make it clear that collaborative applications such as the fifth generation mobile communication technology (5G), the Beidou System and remote sensing satellite industry should be promoted. Improve the high precision navigation and location service capabilities of the BDS in the transportation industry, and build high precision geographic information maps of the BDS in the industry.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said it will accelerate the construction of new infrastructure such as 5G networks and data centers, and build a national industrial Internet big data center in December 2020.

2. Many places are actively planning blueprints for the construction of digital economy related to new infrastructure.

On May 7, 2020, the "Shanghai Action Plan to Promote New Infrastructure Construction (2020-2022)" was unveiled, and Shanghai initially sorted out the first batch of 48 major projects and engineering packages to be implemented in this field in the next three years, with a total investment of about 270 billion yuan, government investment at all levels of about 60 billion yuan, and the remaining 210 billion yuan is social investment.

The "Shanghai Industrial Green Loan Support Green New Infrastructure (Data center) development Guidance" was formulated and implemented, clearly providing accurate financial services for high-quality data center projects, and giving certain loan interest rates to data center projects using different advanced energy-saving technologies.

The "Three-year Action Plan for New Infrastructure Construction (2020-2022)" issued by Fujian Province proposes to prioritize the layout of large and super-large data centers by relying on digital Fujian (Changle and Anxi) industrial parks, and build data convergence nodes in northeast Fujian and Southwest Fujian collaborative development areas. By 2022, the total scale of data center racks in use in the province will reach 100,000. Zhejiang proposes to optimize the layout of cloud data centers, and by 2022, the province will build about 25 large and ultra-large cloud data centers, and the total number of servers will reach about 3 million. Deploy edge computing facilities in a centralized area where large amounts of data and high latency are required. Yunnan has proposed to build 10 industry-level data centers by 2022.

Businesses and their alliances are engaged in successive activities. On September 1, 2020, the China Institute of Electronic Technology Standardization held a special seminar on new infrastructure, and 20 units such as Yuntian Lifei, Baidu, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent attended the seminar and proposed to build a "New information infrastructure construction service Alliance".

The new infrastructure Alliance said that it will be guided by national strategy, driven by the market, with enterprises as the main body, build a platform for industry-university-research cooperation around the construction of new information infrastructure, improve the level of research and development, design, production, integration and service, and focus on the construction of big data centers and intelligent computing centers to promote the supply capacity of new infrastructure. We will promote the digital transformation of traditional industries and support the accelerated development of new technologies, industries, business forms and models.

On August 31, the first big data center project of CNNC was officially started.

Alibaba Cloud announced that the three super data centers located in Nantong, Hangzhou and Ulanqab were officially completed, and will add more than one million servers, radiating the three economic belts of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao, and will establish more than 10 super data centers in the country in the future. Tencent recently announced that it will add a number of super-large data center clusters in the future, and the long-term planned deployment of servers will exceed 1 million units.

In other words, the macro planning blueprint at the national level must be implemented at the local and corporate levels.

Third, the development significance of new infrastructure

The "new infrastructure" will build a support network for China's new economic momentum, bring acceleration to China's new economy, and also drive the formation of short and medium term economic growth points. The development significance of the new infrastructure mainly includes the following points.

First, the new infrastructure focuses on the key areas of a new generation of information technology. Appropriately advance the layout of new infrastructure such as 5G infrastructure and big data centers, empower the industrial Internet through 5G, promote the deep integration of 5G and artificial intelligence, and accelerate the construction of digital China, so as to firmly grasp the historic opportunity of a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, and seize the initiative in the development of the digital economy. Thailand promotes the integrated development of the new generation of information technology and manufacturing industry, accelerates the digital and intelligent transformation of industrial enterprises, improves the digital, networked and intelligent development level of manufacturing industry, promotes the transformation of manufacturing mode, production mode and enterprise form, and thus drives industrial transformation and upgrading.

Second, the new infrastructure focuses on the weak links of regional integration. Central cities and urban agglomerations are becoming the main space to carry development factors, but they also face weak links and shortcomings such as administrative boundary restrictions and insufficient regional energy security. Accelerating the layout of intercity high-speed railways and intercity rail transit, UHV power hubs, and major scientific and technological infrastructure, science and education infrastructure, and industrial and technological innovation infrastructure can promote cross-regional infrastructure construction in a coordinated manner, and constantly improve the level of infrastructure connectivity between central cities and key urban agglomerations.

Third, "new infrastructure" will give birth to a large number of new business forms. Just as the popularity of the Internet has brought about the era of e-commerce led by Taobao and Jingdong; The popularity of mobile Internet has brought about the era of social and sharing economy dominated by wechat and Didi. The popularity of 4G network has brought the era of wireless broadband application. As the "new infrastructure" becomes a reality, the "network effect" of the "new infrastructure" will bring exponential growth, bringing a large number of high-growth new businesses that are currently unpredictable.

Fourth, there is huge room for investment in "new infrastructure". In the field of 5G, the country has launched a comprehensive independent network 5G infrastructure network construction, and the three major operators have plans to build 5G base stations. In the data center, because of the wide application of big data and artificial intelligence, the demand for computing power has increased significantly, and leading Internet companies are competing to build ultra-large-scale data centers. Wuhan, Chongqing, Nanjing and other places set off a wave of city competition in computing power; In the field of industrial Internet, many large enterprises, such as Haier, TCL, Sany Heavy Industry, Xugong Group, etc., speed up the construction of industrial Internet platforms in their respective industries, and deploy edge computing networks connected with machinery and equipment; In the field of artificial intelligence, Baidu, MegVII, Yitu and other enterprises have built open platforms for artificial intelligence, and supported ecological development in areas such as autonomous driving, face recognition, and medical film reading.

Finally, the "new infrastructure" will accelerate the "all-online" economy. With the promotion of new infrastructure, not only the original digital industry will be more vigorous development, many traditional service and manufacturing industries will also become online industries, China's industrial digitization level and Internet technology level will be further improved, followed by the overall economic operation of more transparent information transmission, less intermediate links and more efficient resource organization. In turn, it has become a key support for the new driving force of China's economic development.