China is rightly famous for it’s ability to construct infrastructure on a massive scale quickly and effectively. While recent high profile accidents, corruption scandals and malinvestment have tarnished the country’s image slightly, there’s no denying that a great deal of what has been accomplished is tremendously impressive, from the country’s reliable billion-phone mobile network, sparkling airports, and megacities of skyscrapers raised from rice paddies in only two decades. But the country is still lacking in some major areas, especially one of crucial importance to cloud applications: data center coverage.

China has barely 5 percent of Asia’s data center capacity, which it relies upon to support 40 percent of Asia’s internet users- a whopping 500 million, crowding data lines from home PCs, mobile devices, offices and ubiquitous internet bars throughout the country. The problem of data center capacity, however, is more than just one of misdirected top-down investment (and government restrictions on data center construction, which require all foreign data center operators to enter into joint ventures with local partners in order to build new centers), but one of China’s most intractable problems- energy availability.

China’s power grid, despite installing generating capacity equal to the entire grid of the United Kingdom annually, is strained beyond capacity. Efforts to electrify the entire country- which have brought electricity to more than 97% of Chinese homes- along with the country’s massive investment in energy-intensive industries and electric trains- have left little capacity for data centers, often forgotten amid higher-profile prestige projects. Yet, with more Chinese going online every day- and more companies seeking more capacity every day, both within China and abroad- the need for greater data center capacity is clear.

Companies are stepping up to the challenge, both domestically and internationally. On the international front, IBM announced in early 2011 that the company will be collaborating with China’s Range Technology to build a “cloud computing city” in Hebei province near Beijing. The city, a massive, 620,000 square meter collection of data centers, will support a new software development park and provide service to government departments, as well as China’s telecommunications firms, banks, and other private companies.

This isn’t the only data center megaproject announced in China this year. Domestic technology giant Huawei, in support of their cloud computing phone initiative, will likely install millions of terabytes of data center capacity globally in the next few years. Domestic internet services leader Tencent is also in on the game, with a large data center currently being built in Tianjin.

Regardless of the current state of China’s data centers, there is definitely a large-scale mobilization to bring China’s data centers up to global standards, and, in the meantime, superior virtualization software and always-on monitoring centers can help make up for some of the technical deficiencies of China’s less advanced centers, which nonetheless take up much of the work of keeping the country’s users connected.