The name "Blacklight Biotechnology" spread far and wide after news broke that it had signed a staggering four-billion-dollar contract with Facebook.
For the first time, countless people turned their attention to this obscure little company. In turn, the product Little X Translation Assistant quickly gained traction.
It proved more effective than the tens of millions Xia Yin had spent on advertising.
More importantly, the contract Chen Chen had signed with Facebook granted exclusive platform rights only. In other words, Facebook users could use the product for free, while Chen Chen remained free to charge other individual users.
So, riding the wave of publicity, Little X Translation Assistant ultimately adopted a monthly subscription model.
Membership was priced at 25 yuan per month.
For a discount, users could pay 120 yuan upfront for six months, saving 30 yuan.
The best deal was an annual membership: a one-time payment of 200 yuan bought a full year, saving 100 yuan.
In addition, new users could enjoy a 15-day free trial. Each time a user shared the product and successfully brought in a new user who registered an account, they would earn an extra three days of free access.
Those were the prices for users in the Central Continent Region. Prices in other regions would be adjusted according to local economic conditions.
A few days after Chen Chen reached an agreement with Facebook, Black Light Technology employee Ye Dongmei was found to have behaved improperly and accepted bribes while working as an assistant to a manager. Black Light Technology subsequently dismissed her.
Meanwhile, under the company's name, Chen Chen bought an IDC data center in Shangdu Industrial Park that was on the brink of bankruptcy.
A data center, or Internet Data Center, was an intermediary that used the Internet to provide online companies with information services such as collection, storage, and processing.
Take Xia Yin's father's web-game company as an example:
When a new user registered for a game made by Huiyao Company, how could Huiyao record that user's game data so it wouldn't be lost the next time they logged in?
In general, Huiyao had two options:
First: build its own server to support tens or even hundreds of thousands of users accessing it at any given moment.
This meant building a server from scratch. The company would need at least one Machine Room, with an adequate cooling system, as well as professional maintenance staff. The cost would be enormous.
Second: hand the task of storing all that information over to a data center, leaving the company free to focus on developing and maintaining its games.
Put simply, a data center was just a public Machine Room dedicated to storing companies' online information.
In other words, it was what people called a cloud server.
The one Chen Chen had bought was a data center with outdated equipment, frequent outages, and severe data delays, among a host of other problems. It was already on the verge of shutting down.
By scale, it was already a large data center. It had eight Machine Rooms and more than 4,000 servers. Each Machine Room measured 10 by 50 meters, and with the office space included, the entire building occupied 5,000 square meters.
It had originally been one of the data centers operated by the Central Continent Region's state-owned Telecom company. Since it had been established a long time ago, much of its equipment had grown so outdated that it could no longer be upgraded and had fallen completely behind the times.
What's more, under the TIA classification, the data center only had the most basic [Tier I] rating. It had lost its competitive edge among the countless newly built, high-grade data centers.
As a result, Chen Chen bought it from Telecom for just 20 million yuan, including the remaining two years on the land lease.
After buying it, Chen Chen didn't immediately upgrade or replace the old servers. Instead, he first purchased a transformer.
He had originally planned to buy a regional transformer. However, since installing one might cause an abnormal spike in local power consumption and draw the government's attention, he settled for a single 10,000 KVA, 35 KV, all-copper, oil-immersed transformer.
Only when the truck delivered the transformer did Chen Chen realize that the thing was as big as a room.
Its capacity was three times that of the data center's original transformer.
In fact, the servers' power consumption was a secondary concern. The greatest drain was the cooling system in the Machine Rooms.
According to the data center industry's estimates, servers accounted for 40% of total power consumption, cooling for 55%, and other power supplies and lighting for around 5%.
A data center of this size needed a 3,000 KVA transformer to meet its full power requirements.
Now he'd only tripled that capacity. Surely it wouldn't attract the power company's attention, right?
Chen Chen stroked his chin, deep in thought.
In fact, the best way to supply power to the USB Drive was to build a power plant overseas.
For example, in Yinzhou District or Africa District, where the local governments' policies would give Chen Chen far more freedom than he had now. At present, he had to tread carefully in everything he did.
But building a power plant cost an astronomical amount. Before, Chen Chen really couldn't afford it.
Recently, however, with Facebook's four billion dollars having come through, he finally had the means to give it a try.
But that wouldn't solve his immediate problem. Building a power station would take at least a year, so there was no need to rush it for now.
As for Chen Chen's bizarre choices, Xia Yin couldn't make heads or tails of them.
He could have rented a cloud server, but instead he'd spent a fortune buying an old data center. Apart from the land lease and the building itself, the antique servers inside were long overdue to be bundled up and sold for scrap.
But Chen Chen was the boss. After trying and failing to talk him out of it several times, Xia Yin was furious, but had no choice but to let him have his way.
And that wasn't all. A few days later, Chen Chen spent another fortune completely upgrading the data center's costly liquid-cooling system. He replaced all the servers, too, and really did sell the old ones for scrap.
Xia Yin: "What the actual fuck?"
While the renovations were underway, Chen Chen also redesigned the electrical system. He not only replaced the transformer but also built a steel-barrel-like main control room beside it.
The main control room didn't just manage the data center's entire electrical system. Chen Chen also turned it into a home with two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom, spanning over a hundred square meters.
No one in the company could make sense of this arrangement.
Half a month later, once the control room was finished, Chen Chen moved in furniture and household supplies and went to live there himself.
Everyone who heard about it was completely baffled. The only explanation they could come up with was that it was probably just one of the eccentricities of the rich...
In the end, Chen Chen moved in alone to the multimillion-yuan mansion now known as the "Blacklight Biotechnology Data Center."
Only Chen Chen himself understood: having upgraded from a 200 KVA transformer to a 10,000 KVA one, he was sure he could materialize even more interesting movie props this time...
Thanks to [Fengwu Tingzhang], [Book Friend 160621192451341], and [Book Friend 20200102135255961] for the generous donations. As for the last two, I...
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