The ESG Phenomenon – Ping An, Data Centres

Editorial Staff

9 August 2022

, the Chinese insurance group that has tussled with HSBC’s management recently, says that one of its data centres has “set a standard” for saving energy and emissions.

The group made the announcement about its new Ping An Guanlan Data Center No. 3, saying that it intends to be operationally carbon-neutral by 2030 – a sign of how firms around the world continue to burnish their green credentials.

The financial data centre is the first in mainland China to have a Power Usage Effectiveness below 1.25, which is expected to save about 10.5 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6,406 tons per year, it said.

Data centres – part of the infrastructure of today’s digital world – consume heavy amounts of electricity, so energy efficiency can save significant sums, all the more urgent given skyrocketing prices. The PUE is an indicator of the energy efficiency of a data centre. Currently in China, the PUE of financial data centres is generally between 1.6 and 2.

Ping An began to build the data centre in Shenzhen in July 2021. It can serve more than 500 million users,

The insurance group earlier this year proposed to use its shareholder power to break up the UK/Hong Kong-listed bank. HSBC is likely to demur, given that it routinely refers to the benefits of its global status, such as its variety of revenue streams. Ping An has been building a stake in HSBC since 2017. The group proposes to split off HSBC’s Asian operations, arguing this will improve profits and wider performance.