Northwest China's Qinghai Province plans to build the world's first salt lake data center to serve domestic resource planning and provide technical support to other countries.

The center in Xining, the provincial capital, will take eight years to complete with a total investment of 90 million yuan (14 million U.S. dollars), head of the project under the Salt Lakes Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The first phase of construction from 2016 to 2018 will adopt big data and cloud-computing technology to process data about salt lakes.