Chinese Companies Pledge 12.5 Gigawatts in Ulanqab AI Hub as Water and Coal Risks Loom
Updated
Updated · WIRED · Aug 21
Chinese Companies Pledge 12.5 Gigawatts in Ulanqab AI Hub as Water and Coal Risks Loom
3 articles · Updated · WIRED · Aug 21
Summary
Nearly 100 data centers have opened or started construction in Ulanqab since 2016, with more than 70% of the city’s 12.5-gigawatt pledged AI capacity announced in the past year.
Cheap power, cold weather and proximity to Beijing are drawing builders, while two fiber links cut latency to under five milliseconds—making the city viable for both AI training and inference.
DeepSeek, ByteDance, Alibaba and Xiaohongshu are increasingly building their own infrastructure instead of renting cloud compute, signaling a broader catch-up by Chinese AI firms on physical capacity.
Water is the main constraint: Ulanqab gets only about 14 inches of rain annually, and the local utility last month shut several waterworks for seven hours nightly to ease peak demand.
Inner Mongolia’s boom also fits Beijing’s push to absorb excess wind and solar output, but about 37% of Ulanqab’s electricity still comes from coal, complicating claims of a clean AI buildout.