People visit a display center of the National Big Data Comprehensive Pilot Area in southwest China's Guizhou Province, May 22, 2019. (Xinhua/Ou Dongqu)

The construction of a cloud computing data center in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region has been going smoothly, with the first phase of the project to be put into operation in 2021.

After the completion of phase one, the data center will have 10,000 machine cabinets and an annual revenue of 1.5 billion yuan (about 223.5 million U.S. dollars), meeting the data storage needs of key clients in the country and in South Asia.

The data center is located in a high-tech zone of the regional capital city of Lhasa, making it the highest-altitude data center in the world.

With a total planned investment of 11.8 billion yuan, the project will provide services in areas such as video rendering, autonomous driving, distance-learning data backup, among others, according to its Lhasa-based operator, the Ningsuan Technology Group.

It is expected to provide those services to major Chinese provinces and cities, as well as Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and part of Southeast Asia, the company said.

Wang Jun, Ningsuan's vice president and chief marketing officer, said as Lhasa pushes forward with the construction of a regional bureau for stepping up international communications services, Tibet will become a big-data industrial base.