On the morning of December 8, 2025, in the Lingang New Area of Shanghai, a 333 acre piece of land was cleared with the first shovel of an excavator. That is the construction site of Phase 2.1 of China Telecom Lingang Information Park Phase II. After 8 months, the main structure of the building will be topped out; During this year's National Day holiday, the construction site continued to be divided into zones and pushed forward at multiple points. The delivery of the 220 kV substation on the 15th has entered its final stage. In mid October, a bidding announcement was posted on China Telecom Sunshine Procurement Network: the general contracting of the 2.2 phase civil engineering project started bidding, with a total investment of 8661.12 million yuan, a current investment of 537.51 million yuan, and a construction period of 360 days.

Relay on the construction site

The rhythm of this park is always clear. The project is constructed and operated by Lingang Computing Power (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Telecom, covering an area of 333 acres with a planned total construction area of approximately 530000 square meters. The first phase of construction involves approximately 176000 square meters of infrastructure, with construction starting in 2022. In March 2024, the country's first domestically produced single pool 10000 card liquid cooled computing power cluster will be delivered and put into commercial operation here. The second phase plans to invest 25 billion yuan to construct approximately 350000 square meters of infrastructure, with a total construction scale of 290 megawatts. Phase 2.1 will be the first to break ground in December 2025, and after reaching its peak in August this year, it will move on to mechanical and electrical installation and machine room construction. The EPC general contracting budget for the B1C1a building mechanical and electrical project, which is 455 million yuan, has also been awarded. Now the bidding for Phase 2.2 civil engineering has started, and the park has formed a rolling development pattern of Phase 1 production, Phase 2.1 mechanical and electrical, and Phase 2.2 civil engineering cascading.

How to build integration

The total planned construction area for Phase 2.2 is 89124.74 square meters, covering civil engineering units such as B2 of Data Center 2, B3 of Data Center 3, C1b of Computer Room 8, C1 East Steel Platform, and C2 West Steel Platform, as well as outdoor overall projects such as security guards, outdoor electrical systems, outdoor water supply and drainage systems, overall pipelines, fences, greenery, outdoor structures, and outdoor underground pipe galleries. Communication process pipelines and related supporting facilities are also included to achieve integrated bidding of civil engineering and communication supporting facilities. The maximum building height in the design scheme is 40 meters, the maximum single span is 10.5 meters, the highest number of floors is 6, and the maximum single building area is about 48167.89 square meters - one building exceeds half of the total amount in this phase, showcasing the large-scale, high-density, and integrated construction characteristics of the new generation data center. A 360 day cycle means high-intensity and fast-paced promotion, reserving space for subsequent mechanical and electrical installation and rapid deployment of computing equipment. Based on this calculation, if the bidding and construction work goes smoothly, Phase 2.2 is expected to be completed and delivered within next year.

The foundation of the Yangtze River Delta

Behind the investment lies a tangible demand. As the demand for training and reasoning of AI models continues to grow, intelligent computing centers have become scarce resources, and the capital expenditure structure of the three major operators is accelerating from connectivity to computing power. China Telecom's capital expenditure for 2026 is expected to be 73 billion yuan, of which 25.5 billion yuan will be invested in computing infrastructure, a year-on-year increase of 26%, accounting for 35% of the total; In the first half of the year, the capital expenditure was 32.4 billion yuan, and the investment in Computing Power Network increased by 97% year-on-year. On the side of Lingang, the new area has gathered multiple computing power centers and has opened international data dedicated lines to nodes such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo through submarine cables, accelerating the landing of cross-border businesses such as data processing. Shanghai has proposed to strive for the scale of the intelligent computing cloud industry to exceed 200 billion yuan by 2027, while further tightening the energy efficiency threshold for new computing power facilities. Technologies such as liquid cooling are becoming a must-have answer from optional solutions.

Following the principle of prioritizing civil engineering, following up with mechanical and electrical engineering, and deploying computing power, Phase 2.2 has officially moved from drawings to construction sites, which also means that the Lingang Park will continue to release incremental computing power supply in the coming year. After full completion, this area will become an important intelligent computing power supply base in the Yangtze River Delta, supporting the training of trillion parameter large models and the elastic computing power demand of small and medium-sized enterprises. Leveraging the first mover advantage of Lingang in cross-border data flow, it will serve a wider range of international computing power scenarios. From breaking ground to topping out and then to a new round of bidding, the relay in Lingang is still accelerating.Editor/Yang Meiling