Ulanqab
About 90 Data Centers on Wind, Coal and Cheap Power
China reports capacity in racks, cards and floating-point operations, rarely megawatts. Figures below keep the unit each source used.
- Scale: the FT counts 89 data centers built or planned and about 15 GW committed across four campuses (October 2026); Wired counts about 100 since 2016 and 12.5 GW. Local figures from December 2025 list 210,000 standard racks in service and 480,000 planned (a standard rack is 2.5 kW).
- Power: about $0.05/kWh against about $0.11 in Beijing. Inner Mongolia has 117 GW of wind against about 130 GW of mostly coal-fired capacity.
- Latency: 4.2 ms to Beijing over dedicated fiber.
- Program status: Ulanqab's Jining Big Data Industrial Park is part of the Horinger cluster's starting area in the Inner Mongolia hub.
| Campus | MW | Chips or user | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| VNET Bayin campus | About 221 IT; 700 projected late 2027 (estimate) | Ascend 910C (estimate); ByteDance possible user | Onsite generation, storage and load project of 2,150 MW; first 300 MW on the grid by end of 2026 |
| Envision Galaxy Campus | 2,000 planned | Sized for 1 million GPUs | Opened August 2026; more than 80% direct wind power; waterless cooling |
| ByteDance, Jining | 5,000 to 6,000 planned | ByteDance | Target early 2028, reported |
| DeepSeek | About 1,000, own and leased | DeepSeek | Reported |
| Huawei, Alibaba, Apple, Kuaishou, ZData | Not disclosed | Own use and cloud | Operating; Huawei runs three data centers |
The national hubs
Eight Hubs Move Computing West, Toward Power
- Program: launched February 2022 by the National Development and Reform Commission: eight national hubs holding 10 data center clusters, linked by 145 backbone fiber routes, with every province within 20 ms of a hub by the end of 2025.
- Compute: China's intelligent computing capacity reached 2,185 EFLOPS at the end of June 2026, up 177% in a year; the eight hubs hold more than 80%. The 2030 target is 9,800 EFLOPS, with RMB 3.8 trillion (about $532B) of information-infrastructure investment over 2026 to 2030.
- Use: national rack utilization was 71.4% in June 2026. Reports of idle western capacity led the government to plan a resale network for surplus compute.
- Scheduling: a national monitoring system covers about 72% of intelligent compute; a national integrated computing network is one of 109 major projects in the 15th Five-Year Plan.
- Vouchers: local governments, including Shanghai, Chengdu, Shandong, Beijing and Shenzhen, pay part of companies' compute rental.
- National capacity: SemiAnalysis estimates 24 GW operating in China against 56 GW in the US, with 50 GW more under construction or announced in China.
Other hubs
The Other Hubs Report Compute, Not Megawatts
| Hub | Reported capacity | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Qingyang, Gansu | 102,000 racks; 142,000 PFLOPS | About 55% green power; RMB 0.4/kWh or less |
| Horinger and Hohhot, Inner Mongolia | More than 125,000 PFLOPS | China Mobile site about 20,000 cards, 89% domestic chips |
| Gui'an, Guizhou | More than 160 EFLOPS | 27 major data centers incl. Huawei, Tencent, Apple; Huawei Cloud runs 105 supernodes |
| Zhongwei, Ningxia | Not found | Western wind and solar hub |
| Shaoguan, Guangdong | 30,000 PFLOPS; 110,000 targeted end 2026 | Alibaba 10,000-card cluster; Huawei Ascend supernode |
| Wuhu, Anhui (Huawei campus) | About 157 MW; 457 MW projected end 2027 (estimate) | Ascend 910C (estimate) |
| Zhangjiakou, Hebei | Not found | Serves Beijing |
| Chengdu-Chongqing | Not found | Two clusters: Tianfu and Chongqing |
In the Xinjiang and Qinghai deserts, 39 projects approved in late 2024 filed plans for more than 115,000 Nvidia H100 and H200 chips, Bloomberg reported; there is no evidence the chips were obtained.
Chips
Huawei Is Closing on Nvidia in China
- Market share, first half of 2026 (IDC): Nvidia 34%, down 44% in units; Huawei 28%; Alibaba's T-Head 7%; Cambricon 5%; Kunlunxin 4%; Hygon 3%.
- Domestic-only rule: in November 2025 Beijing ordered state-funded data center projects to use domestic chips only; projects less than 30% complete must remove foreign chips or cancel orders.
- US exports: the H20 was licensed again in 2025, then paused after Beijing raised security concerns; the B30A was refused. H200 exports to approved buyers were allowed in January 2026, and Beijing reportedly approved purchases in March.
- Smuggling: in March 2026 a Supermicro co-founder was charged in a scheme to ship about $2.5B of Nvidia servers to China.
See Inference Chips and, on chips themselves, SemiconductorX.
Capex
ByteDance Spends the Most and Rents Abroad
- ByteDance: more than RMB 200B of AI capital spending planned for 2026; the FT calls it China's largest compute renter. It uses about 36,000 Nvidia B200s in Malaysia through a local cloud operator. See YTL Kulai, Johor.
- Alibaba: at least RMB 380B over three years (February 2025), possibly raised to RMB 480B; RMB 67.7B in the April-June 2026 quarter.
- Tencent: RMB 52.8B in the second quarter of 2026.
Underwater and orbital
China Runs Data Centers Under the Sea and Is Launching Them to Orbit
- HiCloud, Shanghai Lingang: a 24 MW underwater data center powered by offshore wind, with a PUE below 1.15, in full commercial operation since May 2026. HiCloud's earlier site off Hainan has run since 2023.
- Three-Body Computing Constellation: ADA Space and Zhejiang Lab launched the first 12 computing satellites in May 2025, of 2,800 planned. See Orbital Data Centers.
Record
Dataset Record
- Dataset
- China national hubs and Ulanqab campuses; hub rows also in world_ai_campuses.csv
- Sources
- National Development and Reform Commission, MIIT, National Data Administration, Xinhua, China Daily, The Paper, Financial Times, Wired, Bloomberg, Reuters, SCMP, IDC via TechNode, Epoch AI, SemiAnalysis, DatacenterDynamics
- Last verified
- October 2026