Chapter 44
The name “Blacklight Biotechnology” spread like wildfire with the news that they signed a four-billion-dollar contract with Facebook.
For the first time, countless people started paying attention to this little-known small company. Following that, the product, Little X Translation Assistant, spread around rapidly as well.
This was more effective than Xia Yin spending over ten million on advertising.
The crucial point was, the contract between Chen Chen and Facebook only covered exclusive authorization on their platform. This meant that only Facebook users did not have to pay any fees. Chen Chen could still charge other individual users.
Therefore, to take advantage of this public opinion effect, Little X Translation Assistant finally imposed a monthly membership fee.
The membership price was set at 25 RMB per month.
If one wanted a discount, one could choose a one-time top-up for 6 months at only 120 RMB, thus saving 30 RMB.
The best deal was the annual membership. By topping up 200 RMB once, the product could be used for a year. This was a discount of 100 RMB.
In addition, new users could enjoy a 15-day free trial period. Moreover, each time a user shared the product and successfully got a new user to register for an account, they would gain three additional days of free use.
This was the price for users in Mainland China. As for other continents, the fee would increase or decrease in proportion to the local economy.
A few days after Chen Chen had reached an agreement with Facebook, an employee of Blacklight Biotechnology, Ye Dongmei, was found to be guilty of inappropriate conduct while acting as the manager’s assistant, with evidence of receiving bribes. She was subsequently fired.
Meanwhile, Chen Chen used the company’s name to purchase an IDC data center in Shangdu Industrial Park that was on the verge of closing down.
This data center referred to an Internet Data Center, an internet-based intermediary that provided information services such as collection, storage or processing.
Take the web page company of Xia Yin’s old man for example:
After a new user had registered for a game created by Sparkle Entertainment, how should Sparkle Entertainment record their game information to prevent any troublesome data loss the next time the user logged in?
In most cases, Sparkle Entertainment would have two options:
The first one: Build a server themselves, which would support user logins for tens of thousands of accounts or even hundreds of thousands of accounts, every second.
This option required a server to be built from scratch and at least one server room. This room must also have an adequate heat dissipation system. In addition to the cost of hiring professional maintenance services, this would not come cheap.
The second option: Hand over the task of storing information to a data center. The company itself only had to concentrate on game development and maintenance.
To put it simply, the data center was a public server room dedicated to storing the network information of several companies.
This was also known as a cloud server.
The one Chen Chen had bought was a data center on the verge of closing down due to a string of problems including old equipment, frequent freezes, and serious data lags.
In terms of size, this data center was considered large. It had eight server rooms with over 4000 servers. Each server room was 10×50 meters in size. Together with the office, the entire building covered an area of 5000 square meters.
Initially, it was one of the data divisions under Mainland China Public Enterprise Telecommunications. As it had been built so long ago, most of its equipment could no longer be upgraded due to old age and thus, could not keep up with the times.
According to TIA standards[1], this data center only qualified as the most basic [Tier 1]. In the sea of countless, newly established, high-level data centers, it had lost its competitive edge.
As a result, Chen Chen had spent only 20 million to buy it from Telecommunications. This included two years left on the lease.
After the purchase, Chen Chen did not immediately upgrade or replace the old server equipment. First, he bought a transformer.
Chen Chen had wanted to buy a district transformer at first. However, he then considered that the installation of such a transformer might lead to abnormal local electricity consumption, thus attracting the government’s attention. Therefore, in the end, he bought a 10000KVA, 35KV all-copper oil-immersed transformer.
When the truck transported the transformer over, Chen Chen found out that this transformer was as large as a room.
This transformer also had three times the capacity of the original transformer in the data center.
The power consumption of the servers in the data center was secondary. The most power-consuming factor would be the cooling of the server rooms.
According to the power consumption ratio as given by the data center market: Servers accounted for 40% of energy consumption while cooling accounted for 55%. The remaining usage of electricity and lighting took up the last 5%.
A data center like this required a 3000KVA transformer to supply its needs.
At this point, he had only tripled its capacity. Surely this would not attract the attention of the power supply station?
Chen Chen stroked his chin, deep in thought.
In truth, the best way to charge the USB drive was to build a power plant in another continent.
For instance, the Indian Subcontinent or the African Continent where the local government would allow Chen Chen a tremendous degree of freedom. The situation was different here where Chen Chen was walking on thin ice.
Nonetheless, building a power plant would take an astronomical sum of money. In the past, Chen Chen could never afford it.
Still, with the recent four billion USD from Facebook, he had enough to give it a shot.
Even so, distant waters would not put out a nearby fire. Building a power plant would take at least years. Presently, Chen Chen was in too much of a rush for that.
In the meantime, Xia Yin could not understand Chen Chen’s impenetrable operations at all.
Chen Chen could choose to rent cloud servers, yet he insisted on spending a large sum just to buy a rundown data center. Other than the limited value of the lease and the building, those antique servers inside should have been sold off as scrap metal long ago.
However, Chen Chen was the boss. Although Xia Yin became infuriated after days of advising Chen Chen in vain, she could only go along with his plans.
Not only that, but a few days later, Chen Chen paid a gigantic price to overhaul the expensive liquid cooling system of the data center. At the same time, he replaced all the servers and ended up selling the old servers as scrap metal.
Xia Yin: ‘What a mother*cker?!’
While repairs were ongoing, Chen Chen had restructured the power system. Not only did he switch out the transformer, but he also built a solid main control room beside the transformer.
The main control room commanded the power system of the entire data center. Furthermore, Chen Chen also refurbished this control room as a living space with two rooms, a living room and a kitchen, that covered more than a hundred square meters.
No one in the company could fathom the point of this endeavor.
Half a month later, when the main control room was ready, Chen Chen transported some furniture and living supplies at once and moved into the space.
Everyone who heard of this reacted with a stupefied expression. The only justification they could come up with was that this must be some idiosyncratic trait of the rich…
At last, Chen Chen lived alone in this multi-million mansion that had taken on the name of “Blacklight Biotechnology Data Center.”
Only Chen Chen knew that, after changing from a 200KVA to a 10000KVA transformer, now he could certainly instantiate more interesting movie items…
[1] TIA stands for Telecommunications Industry Association. For more information, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIA-942