How Huawei Data Centers Achieve Both Energy Savings and Equipment Safety Through Air Quality Monitoring

As the number and scale of data centers continue to grow, maintaining a healthy and efficient internal environment has become an essential challenge. Huawei’s data centers in Wuhu, Guizhou, and Inner Mongolia, along with 12 other sites, have adopted Tongdy air quality monitoring solutions, achieving real-time air quality optimization while ensuring both safety and energy savings. By installing Tongdy MSD indoor air quality monitors and TF9 outdoor air quality sensors, Huawei collects real-time environmental data and, combined with the center's intelligent management system, adjusts HVAC and purification systems to ensure the best balance of indoor and outdoor air quality.

Why Data Centers Must Implement Professional Air Quality Control

1. Ensuring Equipment Reliability

Critical equipment in data centers, such as UPS systems, servers, and storage arrays, is highly sensitive to air quality. Proper monitoring and control of air quality improve equipment reliability and stability, minimizing the risk of equipment failure due to environmental factors and ensuring business continuity.

Reducing particulate pollution:

When PM2.5/PM10 concentrations approach ISO14644-1 Class 8 standards (3.52×10⁶ particles/m³ /m³), the system activates purification to prevent fan blockages and circuit board dust accumulation, which can lead to short circuits.

Controlling temperature and humidity:

Relative humidity above 60% accelerates copper corrosion rates.

A temperature difference of over 10°C between day and night can lead to condensation, causing hard drive failures.

By maintaining optimal temperature and humidity, the system prevents thermal expansion damage, static discharge, and surface corrosion, extending the operational lifespan of servers.

Monitoring corrosive gases:

Gases like H2S and SO2, when present in high concentrations, can accelerate the corrosion of metal components, raising device impedance and causing transmission failures on circuit boards. This reduces the average lifespan of server motherboards to just 3-5 years. Monitoring and removing these harmful gases is critical for maintaining hardware longevity.

2. Lowering Operational Costs

By managing air quality, data centers can reduce equipment corrosion and failures, lowering maintenance and replacement costs. Protecting devices from air-induced damage also safeguards data security by preventing system failures that could lead to data loss or leakage. This, in turn, avoids further increases in operational costs.

3. Reducing Energy Consumption in Modern AI Data Centers

With the rise of AI and high-density compute racks, cooling now accounts for 40-60% of a data center's total energy consumption. Traditional cooling systems, which operate at a fixed load regardless of outdoor conditions, lead to significant energy waste.

Air quality monitoring enables smarter, more energy-efficient cooling strategies:

Free cooling with outdoor air:

When outdoor PM2.5 levels are low and the temperature is appropriate, the system increases fresh-air intake to reduce the load on air conditioning.

Dynamic purification control:

When pollution levels rise, the system switches to internal circulation, adjusting purification power according to the pollution level.

Data-driven maintenance:

The data platform automatically generates energy consumption reports, providing actionable insights to optimize strategies and prevent unnecessary energy use.