China plans to build the world's first salt lake data centre with an investment of USD 14 million at its northwest Qinghai Province to serve domestic resource planning and provide technical support to other countries.
The centre in Xining, the provincial capital, will take eight years to complete with a total investment of 90 million yuan (USD 14 million), said Wang Jianping, head of the project under the Salt Lakes Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The first phase of construction from 2016 to 2018 will adopt big data and cloud-computing technology to process data about salt lakes, she said.
The centre will also launch a website for salt lake tourism, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
"The national data centre will lay a foundation for important breakthroughs in salt lake research," Wang said.
Qinghai, a sparsely populated province spread across the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau, boasts China's largest salt lake, Qairhan Salt Lake, which covers more than 5,000 square kilometres on the southern edge of the Qaidam Basin.
China has more than 1,000 salt lakes, located mainly in Qinghai and the autonomous regions of Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia.
