Lithium batteries for data centers are emerging as a new market increment.

Recently, CATL stated at a performance briefing that the demand for data centers and distribution storage will become a high-quality incremental market in the future, and the shipment of data center energy storage batteries driven by large-scale projects will also grow rapidly.

In recent years, with the development trend of artificial intelligence, it has driven the development of cloud computing, large models, and AI intelligent agents. Correspondingly, the demand for computing power is also increasing. According to market statistics, the global IDC (data center) market will maintain a compound annual growth rate of 22% from 2023 to 2030, and the rapid development of the IDC market will also drive the rapid growth of storage demand.

From the perspective of IDC's own development needs, in order to meet the rapidly increasing computing power demand in downstream markets, IDC is gradually transforming into AIDC (Intelligent Computing Center), which means larger computing power capacity, greater power consumption, and stronger demand for distribution and storage.

In terms of project construction, according to incomplete statistics, nearly 150 intelligent computing center projects have been put into operation nationwide in 2024, and 28 new computing power center projects were planned to be built in February this year.

According to the analysis of GGII, the power demand of a large data center is generally above 100MW, with an annual power consumption of approximately 350000 to 400000 yuan for electric vehicles. In order to meet the high proportion of clean power supply demand in data centers in China, it is usually necessary to overfit and configure energy storage. Coordinating the construction of a large-scale scenic base and a national hub node for computing power may become the best solution.

In terms of configuration, a data center with a total power requirement of 100MW requires a storage capacity of 450MW with a 75% green power ratio; A data center with a total power requirement of 100MW requires a storage capacity of 800MW with a 100% green power ratio.

Based on this calculation, GGII predicts that the global shipment of lithium batteries for data center energy storage will exceed 69GWh by 2027, and this number will increase to 300GWh by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of over 80% from 2024 to 2030.

After energy storage, commercial vehicles, eVTOL and other tracks, strong market growth is making data centers a new niche area, attracting lithium battery companies to enter.

At present, the energy storage batteries used in data centers are transitioning from UPS to BBU (which has higher flexibility and conversion efficiency compared to UPS), and are also shifting from traditional lead-acid batteries to lithium batteries.

Compared to the slowdown in growth faced by the power battery market in recent years, according to Gao Gong Lithium Battery, some lithium battery companies have seen more profit growth coming from new tracks such as data centers. This has also attracted more and more lithium battery companies to actively enter the field of lithium batteries for data centers.

Nandu Power recently stated that the company's data center has a high volume of orders on hand and related orders continue to land; Azure Lithium has already shipped BBU backup power batteries and is currently developing and mass producing specialized models of lithium batteries for BBU use;Xinwangda already has BBU battery products that can be produced according to customer needs. Major domestic battery companies such as CATL, EVE Energy, and China Innovation Airlines have also released job vacancies related to data centers, actively expanding their data center business.

The AI wave has driven exponential growth in demand for computing power, which is driven by strong energy demand. Based on the green electricity requirements under the background of dual carbon transformation, the new energy industry represented by the lithium battery industry will also fully benefit.