One of the world’s most recognised architecture practices, with landmark buildings across China, needed workstations for its staff in Beijing, inside mainland China. No provider served the market, and building its own site was expensive and slow to license. Computle China, launched with China Mobile, put them on 40 dedicated workstations in a Beijing data centre.
The practice is one of the most recognised architecture businesses in the world, with landmark buildings on several continents and a body of work in China. Part of its team is based in Beijing. When it looked for a remote workstation platform for those staff, it found that no provider served mainland China. The closest option was Hong Kong, which sits outside the mainland network and adds latency and a border to every session.
The alternative was to build in China directly. Opening a site inside the country is expensive, and the regulatory requirements for operating IT infrastructure there are demanding for a practice whose business is architecture, not data centres.
That left workstations under desks in its Beijing office: machines to specify, buy, import and refresh, with the heat, noise and power draw of high-end hardware in an office that was not built for it.
Computle's founder, Jake Elsley, has travelled to China regularly for the past four years, building relationships with suppliers and operators there. Those visits led to a partnership with China Mobile, and together they launched Computle China.
Computle China gives the practice what it could not buy before: dedicated Computle workstations in a Beijing data centre, on the mainland network, managed by Computle. Its Beijing team now works on 40 of them.
The workstations run AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processors, with a mix of NVIDIA RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 graphics cards matched to what each seat does.
The practice buys the service, not the infrastructure. There is no site to license, no hardware to source or import, and no refresh cycle to plan.
Moving the machines out of the office removes the overheating risk that comes with running high-end workstations in a space designed for people rather than hardware.
In the data centre, the workstations run on redundant power supplies and redundant feeds, so a single power fault does not take a designer's machine down. Uptime improved accordingly.
Staff reach their workstation from the office, from home, or from another of the practice’s locations, and the machine itself stays where the power, cooling and network are built for it.
The practice already had an IT supplier it wanted to keep. Computle does not require customers to take every service from Computle, so that supplier continues to provide the storage and the Panzura system the team works on.
The practice uses Panzura and its supplier's services as required, with Computle providing the workstations and the platform around them. Each partner does the part it is best placed to do, and the practice keeps the relationships it has built.
Alongside the workstations, the practice bought its own network links from Hong Kong into the mainland, supported by Computle's specialist contacts at China Mobile.
Arranging cross-border connectivity in China is a specialist exercise. The practice got to the right people through Computle rather than starting from scratch with a carrier it had no relationship with.
The practice’s people in Beijing work on dedicated workstations inside mainland China, on infrastructure the practice does not have to own, license or maintain.
It gained data centre power and cooling in place of office conditions, redundant power in place of a single office supply, and a route into China Mobile for the network links it needed, while keeping its existing IT supplier and Panzura storage.
For practices with staff in markets that the major platforms do not serve, Computle China shows what a local partnership can deliver: the same workstation service, in a market that previously had no option at all.