Tencent Gui'an Qixing Cave Data Center

Tencent's Qixing ("Seven Stars") data center in Gui'an New Area, Guizhou, is built into a mountain rather than a conventional building, using five main tunnels, one diesel tunnel, one civil-defense command tunnel and thirteen vertical exhaust shafts to exploit the rock mass as a natural cold source and to ventilate the site. Construction of phase 1 started in September 2017 and finished in July 2020, following trial operation from May 2018, on a roughly 776-mu site (about 517,000 sqm) with more than 30,000 sqm of tunnel floor area, at a reported investment of RMB 820 million. Tencent states the cave design needs no on-site staff for routine operation and holds it out as its highest-security commercial facility, used to store the company's most core data. The project won China's National Quality Engineering Award and the Zhan Tianyou Award from the China Civil Engineering Society, plus a first-prize innovation award from the China Highway & Transportation Society for tunnel and underground-space engineering. Published server capacity for the cave phase itself is around 50,000 servers; a separate, larger figure sometimes quoted (300,000 servers) appears to describe the wider Gui'an campus master plan rather than the cave alone. Power capacity in MW is not published.