Travel just two hours west of Beijing by train, and you’ll find yourself surrounded by the rolling grasslands and ancient cinder cones of Inner Mongolia. This vast, arid land has long been China’s capital of sheep farming and coal mining, but over the last few years, it has become the hottest place in the country to build an AI data center. In Ulanqab, a city in Inner Mongolia home to about 1.5 million people, nearly 100 data centers have been opened or begun construction since 2016. Chinese companies have pledged to build projects with a combined estimated capacity of 12.5 gigawatts in the city, and over 70 percent of the total commitments have been announced in just the last year, making it one of the fastest growing compute clusters in Asia, according to a research note published by Goldman Sachs last week. For comparison, OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate Project is set to reach only 10 gigawatts of total capacity when it’s complete.
Chinese companies are flocking to Ulanqab for a number of reasons. The city sits at high elevation on the Inner Mongolian Plateau and has long, cold winters, which means data centers there don’t need to use as much energy to stay cool. It’s also relatively close to Beijing, so data can be transmitted to China’s populous regions with minimum latency. But the most enticing factor has to do with costs. Electricity is cheaper in Inner Mongolia than almost anywhere else in China, driven by both the strong growth of wind and solar energy and an abundant supply of coal.
The Boonies Inner Mongolia has been a data center hot spot for at least a decade, long before the current AI boom. Huawei built its first one in Ulanqab in 2016, and Apple followed suit three years later. In 2021, the area was designated as one of the main hubs of a country-wide government project dubbed “Eastern Data, Western Compute,” which aims to build data centers in the Western hinterlands of China.
Source: wired
