Remote sensing-based Earth observation and Earth system numerical simulation serve as two significant technical means in revealing the Earth’s environmental changes and predicting its future states. Hence, they assist in enhancing the capacity of human society to mitigate and adapt to global change and in ensuring the sustainable development of the natural environment and human society. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is a large-scale international collaboration project in the field of Earth system numerical simulation, aiming to coordinate various countries to complete the simulations of the Earth’s historical environment and the predictions of its future states. The Earth simulation data generated in the CMIP directly support the global climate change assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), United Nations, providing a solid scientific basis for global climate negotiations and governance. The CMIP Phase 6 (CMIP6) has generated up to 30 petabytes (PB) of Earth simulation data. The management and sharing of these data are achieved through the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). This study elucidates the CMIP organizational scheme, the ESGF system architecture, and the sharing and interoperability progress of Earth simulation data. It can provide a reference for planning, designing, and operating large-scale networks for sharing remote sensing science data.