Boss Huang originally planned to stay in Yisheng for only seven days. However, due to unexpected changes, he spent another seven days inspecting the entire southwestern region of Yizhou before returning to Jincheng.
"How about the Bashimodel? Can it be promoted to the entire southwestern region?" the relevant leaders eagerly asked, clearly wanting to extract as much as possible from Boss Huang.
Our Boss Huang, of course, was not that foolish. He shook his head and said, "After going to the more southwestern areas, I discovered that the transportation in Bashicity is actually quite good. At least there's a highway directly connecting to Bashicity, and Bashicity also has basic roads that can connect to those scenic spots. Although these roads are narrow, the foundation is there. As long as we spend money to widen them, it will not be a problem to build a complete transportation system."
"But the situation in the more southwestern areas is completely different. Many areas don't even have highways. Do I have to invest in building new highways to connect these areas?" Boss Huang frowned and said.
"That's easy to handle! According to the plan, these areas will be connected by highways within five years!" the relevant leader immediately patted his chest and assured, "The state has already allocated funds, so transportation is not a problem. Our goal is to connect all cities with highways within five years, and all villages with cement roads within ten years. How does that sound?"
"That's naturally no problem!" Huang He smiled and said, "But the development of these areas should wait until after five years. We can consider the construction of scenic spots when the relevant roads are built!"
The relevant leaders were immediately anxious. Who knew what the situation would be like in five years? They weren't even sure if Boss Huang, that fat sheep, would still be fat.
So, these leaders began to pour out their grievances to Boss Huang, making him dizzy. He could only say directly, "Dear leaders, anyone with eyes can see that my investment in Bashicity is mostly going to be a loss. But Bashicity is my hometown, so I accept losing some money to contribute to my fellow townsfolk!"
"However, the southwestern region has nothing to do with me, and investing in tourism there is almost impossible to recoup the costs. You can't expect me to lose hundreds of billions after hundreds of billions. Even if I were the richest man in the world, I couldn't withstand such losses!" Boss Huang's words left all the leaders present speechless, not knowing what to say.
In fact, they also knew that Huang He and Jiangnan Group investing and developing the Bashicity area like this was already very advantageous. Expecting them to invest more at a loss was indeed asking too much. They were just trying their luck.
Just as this meeting seemed to be ending imperfectly, Boss Huang suddenly spoke again, "Although tourism is not feasible in those areas, I've found that it might not be impossible with a different project!"
"Oh! What project?" the surrounding leaders asked curiously.
"Super data center!" Boss Huang uttered a term that left everyone a bit baffled. Fortunately, Boss Huang knew that most people at this time wouldn't understand what a super data center was.
So Boss Huang continued to explain. It turned out that with the development of the internet in China, broadband networks had basically spread to all regions, and even 3G networks were starting to be deployed in some first-tier cities.
The development of the internet brought about even greater data traffic.
After all, the number of internet users was constantly increasing, and users' demand for online content was also increasing.
In 2001, users' demand for the internet might have just been enough for text chat in chat rooms.
By 2003, this demand had become pictures.
Two years later, the demand became short videos.
By 2008, the demand had become the ability to smoothly browse TV-series-level videos online, which required a terrifying amount of network and data processing.
If the network demand in 2001 was a small stream, then the current network demand was such that even the entire ocean might not be enough.
And Jiangnan Group had a large number of online businesses. Besides the various network products under oo network, Jiangnan Group's most core business was data services, which meant leasing its server data capacity and space to other network companies that needed a small amount or extremely large amounts of data traffic to provide data services.
According to Boss Huang, 21% of the total traffic in China was now flowing to their own server data processing centers, which had already overloaded Jiangnan Group's server data processing capabilities.
Initially, Jiangnan Group had established two data processing centers in the north and south. Later, the number of such data processing centers expanded to five, and the servers were constantly being expanded. Especially the data center in Wenzhou, it was said that to cool these servers, the water temperature of the surrounding sea had risen by 0.23 degrees, attracting protests from some public welfare organizations.
However, even these data centers were still not enough, and Jiangnan Group was on the verge of being overloaded again.
Therefore, Boss Huang planned to directly carry out a super expansion of the entire data processing center at once, building five new super data processing centers in five regions across the country.
These data processing centers were aimed at all network traffic for the next 30 years. Therefore, the data processing centers occupied a vast area. In Boss Huang's words, it would take digging out two or three mountains to be enough.
In addition, the area must be well-ventilated and the temperature must be very cool, only then can the tremendous heat generated by the super data processing centers be quickly dissipated.
Of course, the most crucial point is that electricity costs must be cheap. The data processing center in Wenzhou alone consumes over 1 billion yuan in electricity costs annually... Boss Huang had even started planning to build his own power plants to meet the demand.
In summary, while inspecting the southeastern region of Yisheng, Boss Huang was surprised to find that it was a good place.
First, due to the high elevation of the southwestern region, the surrounding temperature was very cool, consistently below 10 degrees Celsius, as there were still snow-capped mountains around.
Moreover, the southwestern region was mountainous, and the wind speed in the valleys was also very strong, capable of taking away the massive heat generated by the servers. Jiangnan Group wouldn't even need to build any factory buildings; they could simply find ways to hollow out one or two mountains and use the mountains as factory buildings to create the perfect data centers.
Finally, regarding electricity costs, everyone had probably seen news reports about how many mining farms in the future preferred to hide in the mountains of the southwestern region.
It wasn't that these mining farms were trying to conceal their operations, but rather because the electricity costs there were very cheap.
The southwestern region was mountainous and at a high elevation, with abundant water resources, which brought rich hydropower and wind power resources. Currently, there were as many as tens of thousands of small power plants in the southwestern region, and the electricity supplied by these small power plants was more than enough to supply the entire southwestern region. About 70% of the electricity was idle and wasted.
Electricity resources were not like other things; especially those generated by hydropower and wind power. These would not be consumed more just because you used more. If not used, they would only be wasted, so the electricity prices in the southwestern region were very cheap. Overall, people were encouraged to use electricity.
However, the people in the southwestern region were poor and couldn't use much electricity.
Conversely, the electricity price advantage here was very suitable for super data processing centers, as the demand for super data processing centers could never match so much idle power generation capacity.
In conclusion, Boss Huang expressed his willingness to establish this super data center in the southwestern region and hoped to receive support from the relevant authorities.
Boss Wang stated that the investment in this super data center would be at least in the tens of billions, and it could even rise to hundreds of billions in the future, depending on the development of China's internet.
However, after Boss Huang finished his explanation, there was no excessive excitement at the scene, far less enthusiastic than the scenic spot plan Boss Huang had proposed earlier.
But Boss Huang was not surprised by this, because the scenic spot plan was a large-scale infrastructure project. Once launched, it would bring about huge construction demands, creating over 100,000 jobs in construction alone.
And after these attractions were built, the continuous consumption brought by tourist traffic was even more tantalizing.
However, the super data center was different. The only infrastructure involved was hollowing out mountains, and the demand for capacity was very low. A large construction company could meet this need.
The core cost of this data center was actually servers, but these servers were self-produced by Jiangnan Group, meaning they were sold internally. The local area could not benefit from any of this.
Perhaps the only sector that could gain revenue was the electricity industry, which could earn a few hundred million more in electricity fees annually. For the leaders, this was far from enough.
Boss Huang was well aware of this, so he quickly continued, "The super data center is a foundation. We also have a more core project that will be launched following the super data center, and this project can bring about a huge industry on the scale of hundreds of billions or even trillions!"
"Trillions?" Everyone at the scene was stunned. Boss Huang was too boastful. Talking about trillions at once, the global game industry was only on the scale of trillions.
Boss Huang, however, was very serious, "Everyone, I have no intention of deceiving you. Because the industry I am talking about will be the industry that leads the entire world's development in the future, and that industry is the artificial intelligence industry!"
"Artificial intelligence?" This term didn't require Boss Huang to explain, as humans had proposed the concept of artificial intelligence over a hundred years ago. Everyone knew what it meant.
But why did this sentence sound so unrealistic?
"Mr. Huang, please forgive our frankness, but the concept of artificial intelligence has been around for almost a century, yet no matter how advanced a computer is, it doesn't seem qualified to be called artificial intelligence. This industry might not develop that quickly!" a leader said with a smile.
This statement was actually very polite.
"No, with the launch of our Jiangnan Group's five-进制 computer, the era of artificial intelligence has already begun. Because the five-进制 computer is the most suitable computer for massive data integration, calculation, and learning. Its speed in artificial intelligence computation is more than 25 times that of binary computers. Within one to two years at the fastest, a large number of artificial intelligences will inevitably emerge and lead the global development craze."
"Then we'll talk about that in a year or two!" someone said sarcastically.
"Heh heh, I'm talking about large-scale emergence. In fact, the first artificial intelligence developed by our Jiangnan Group has already been born in our Jiangnan Artificial Intelligence Research Center. I will introduce him to everyone now!" Boss Huang said, taking out his Tianzhou terminal.
Some keen observers noticed that the appearance of the Tianzhou terminal in Boss Huang's hand seemed different from the models sold on the market. This was clearly a brand new, unreleased model!
"Come, Houtu, say hello to everyone here!" Boss Huang said to his terminal, looking like an idiot.
Then, a slightly playful voice came from the terminal, "Okay! Dear Mr. Huang He, hello everyone. I am Houtu, an artificial meteorological and geological prediction artificial intelligence developed by Jiangnan Group. In the future, all meteorological and geological disasters will not escape my calculations!"