AI data centres

The BBC visited Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia this week and found data centres rising beside potato fields at what workers call “China speed”. The city has signed 100 data centre projects worth more than 500 billion yuan and already holds 8.7% of China’s computing capacity. Cold air allows free cooling for about ten months a year, a quirk of the West Inner Mongolia Power Grid keeps electricity at roughly half the Beijing price, and a fibre link reaches Beijing in 4.2 milliseconds. DeepSeek plans a 1 GW campus with 160,000 Huawei Ascend chips, and Envision has commissioned a 2 GW campus. But villages have been relocated, a large data centre employs only a few hundred people, and an estimated 10% to 15% of the investment stays local. This article covers the numbers, the chip question and what it means for businesses outside China.