Alibaba Cloud Qiandao Lake Data Center

Alibaba Cloud opened this self-built data center in Qingxi New Town, Chun'an County, in September 2015, built around a lake-water cooling loop rather than conventional chillers. Deep water is drawn from Qiandao Lake through closed pipes to cool the facility, then routed roughly 2.5 km through Qingxi New Town's central canal before returning to the lake, giving free cooling for most of the year. Alibaba Cloud reports an annual average PUE below 1.3, with recorded lows around 1.13-1.17, and a water usage effectiveness (WUE) of 0.197, which the company said beat the previously publicized record set by a Facebook Oregon facility. The site also draws on solar and hydro power and recovers server waste heat for office heating in the surrounding new town. It was one of the first large-scale natural-water-cooled data centers built in China and predates the liquid/immersion cooling now common in AI-era builds. Exact power capacity and floor area have not been published by the operator. As with other Alibaba Cloud sites in this catalog, this is company-owned infrastructure supporting Alibaba's own cloud services rather than third-party colocation.