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), said Wang Jianping, 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, she said.

The center will also launch a website for salt lake tourism.

“The national data center will lay a foundation for important breakthroughs in salt lake research,” said Wang.

Qinghai boasts the country’s largest salt lake, Qinghai Lake, which covers more than 5,000 square kilometers on the southern edge of the Qaidam Basin.

China has more than 1,000 salt lakes, located mainly in Qinghai and the autonomous regions of Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia.