I think of a data centre as a set of promises about what happens after something breaks. The equipment can be bought. Keeping the promises depends on writing them down honestly, selling only what they allow and training the people on night shift to act on them without waiting for permission. Most of my difficult decisions have been about refusing to let a sale, a schedule or a budget quietly rewrite those promises.
Min Wenren
Revenue in 2025
RMB1.46bn
Colocation and managed private-cloud hosting
Design IT capacity
62 MW
Fourteen halls in five buildings in Suzhou, Kunshan and Jiaxing
Shift colleagues
252
Four-team rota covering every hour of the year
Leadership, seen by others.
Min told me in 2022 that saying yes to our largest customer would mean spending our other customers' safety margin on its peak. I did not enjoy hearing it, and we lost revenue that year. We also stopped depending on one account, which I could not have arranged by asking nicely.
Zhenhao QuChief executive and co-founder, Haolinjiang Data Services
When the daytime switching rule came in, many of us were angry about the night allowances. She came to the shift briefings to hear it instead of sending a notice, and admitted she had announced it in the wrong order. The electricians' allowance came out of those meetings.
Liyao BanDuty manager, Suzhou campus, Haolinjiang Data Services
We worked together when she ran our server rooms, and we are now a Haolinjiang customer. Her incident reports tell us what stopped, for how long and what will change, before our quality team has to ask.
Qianwen RongHead of IT infrastructure, Ruitaigang Electronics
Selected leadership work
Redesigning a Jiaxing building's cooling to fit its energy approval
In 2021 we were preparing Jiaxing Building 2: three halls with 13.5 MW of design IT load.
I sell and run data-centre capacity on the basis of what each hall can still carry once a chiller, a UPS module or an experienced shift engineer is unavailable.
I am chief operating officer of Haolinjiang Data Services, a privately held operator of colocation data centres and managed private-cloud hosting in the Yangtze River Delta. We run five buildings on three campuses, in Suzhou, Kunshan and Jiaxing, with fourteen data halls and about 12,400 cabinets. Revenue in 2025 was RMB1.46 billion. Most of it comes from manufacturers running production systems and from e-commerce companies whose traffic surges around the shopping festivals. Of our 760 employees, 505 work in my organisation across facilities, construction and service delivery. Two hundred and fifty-two of them work rotating shifts that cover every hour of the year.
I trained as a power-systems engineer and spent my first six years installing substations and distribution boards for factories around Wuxi and Changzhou. Everything since has extended that work: hosting floors in Suzhou, a Kunshan manufacturer's server rooms, and nearly thirteen years at Haolinjiang, where I built the critical-facilities function before taking charge of the whole operation in March 2021. The constant lesson is that a data centre's published and dependable capacity are different numbers, and the difference belongs in the customer contract, not an engineer's notebook.
The decisions described on this site show that difference being priced and defended. We redesigned the cooling of a new building in Jiaxing so that it could be filled within the energy allowance its approval set, and accepted a five-month delay. We declined to run a hall without redundancy during a shopping festival for our largest customer, who then accounted for nearly a third of revenue. After a contractor opened the wrong breaker in 2019, we moved planned electrical switching into staffed daytime windows under two-person verification, a change that several customers and our own night teams disliked.
A new building filled within its energy approval
Jiaxing Building 2 opened in March 2024 with indirect evaporative cooling instead of the chilled-water design first drawn. In 2025, at 74 per cent of design load, its annual PUE was 1.24, against 1.31 in its first six partly filled months.
Our largest customer's share fell from 31 to 24 per cent
After the 2022 festival decision, the board set a concentration limit and we sold new capacity to 46 manufacturers and smaller online retailers. The largest customer still renews with us, on a smaller hall footprint.
No switching errors in about 1,900 planned electrical operations
Since the 2019 change, every planned switching operation has used a signed method statement, a second authorised electrician and a daytime window. The arrangement costs about RMB4.1 million a year more than the contract it replaced.
Current focus
I am preparing the operating and energy case for a sixth building in Jiaxing, including how much of its load should be liquid-cooled for manufacturers training visual-inspection models, and how its shift teams will be recruited and trained before the first customer cabinet arrives.
Conversations I welcome
I would consider one independent or non-executive board role in a manufacturing, logistics or digital-services company whose operations depend on continuous systems, with about twenty-five days a year available after my employer's consent and a review of customer relationships.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
Formation
Bachelor of engineering, electrical power systemsXunyanhe Institute of Power Engineering · 1996
I would consider one independent or non-executive board role in a manufacturing, logistics or digital-services company whose operations depend on continuous systems, with about twenty-five days a year available after my employer's consent and a review of customer relationships.
