The Unlikely Place at the Center of China’s AI Boom
The Unlikely Place at the Center of China’s AI Boom
中国人工智能热潮背后的“意外之地”
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. 从北京乘火车向西行驶仅需两小时，你就会置身于内蒙古连绵起伏的草原和古老的火山锥之中。这片广袤干旱的土地长期以来一直是中国畜牧业和煤矿业的中心，但近年来，它已成为中国建设人工智能数据中心最热门的地区。
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. 在内蒙古乌兰察布市（人口约 150 万），自 2016 年以来，已有近 100 个数据中心投入运营或开始建设。据高盛上周发布的一份研究报告显示，中国企业已承诺在该市建设总容量预计达 12.5 吉瓦（GW）的项目，其中超过 70% 的承诺是在过去一年内宣布的，这使其成为亚洲增长最快的计算集群之一。作为对比，OpenAI 耗资 5000 亿美元的“星际之门”（Stargate）项目在完工后，总容量预计也仅为 10 吉瓦。
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. 中国企业蜂拥至乌兰察布的原因有很多。该市位于内蒙古高原，海拔较高且冬季漫长寒冷，这意味着当地的数据中心无需消耗太多能源进行冷却。此外，它距离北京相对较近，数据可以以极低的延迟传输到中国人口稠密的地区。但最吸引人的因素还是成本。得益于风能和太阳能的强劲增长以及丰富的煤炭供应，内蒙古的电价几乎是中国最低的。
What’s also interesting is who is building these data centers. For the first time, Chinese AI companies are making big investments in their own infrastructure, rather than renting compute from cloud companies. DeepSeek is reportedly building a massive AI data center in Ulanqab, as are ByteDance, Alibaba, and Xiaohongshu. For years, Chinese AI companies have spent far less on building physical infrastructure than their American peers, despite developing a number of popular AI models with impressive capabilities. The Ulanqab data center boom signals that now they are finally starting to catch up. 同样有趣的是，谁在建设这些数据中心。中国人工智能公司首次开始在自身基础设施上进行大规模投资，而不是从云服务商那里租用算力。据报道，深度求索（DeepSeek）正在乌兰察布建设一个大型人工智能数据中心，字节跳动、阿里巴巴和小红书也在跟进。多年来，尽管中国人工智能公司开发了许多功能强大的热门模型，但在物理基础设施建设上的投入远低于美国同行。乌兰察布的数据中心热潮表明，他们终于开始迎头赶上了。
There’s just one problem: finding enough water. Ulanqab is about as dry as Denver, getting only roughly 14 inches of rain each year. The local government is already struggling to provide enough water to meet resident demand—before many of the planned data center projects are even up and running. Last month, the local water company in Ulanqab was forced to turn off several waterworks for seven hours each night to mitigate peak demand. The data centers being built in the city will need less water in the winter—weather data from the local government of Ulanqab shows they only require additional water for cooling during two months out of the year—but all of the new infrastructure could still pose a significant environmental challenge for the region. 但有一个问题：水资源短缺。乌兰察布和丹佛一样干旱，年降雨量仅约 14 英寸（约 355 毫米）。在许多规划中的数据中心项目尚未投入运营之前，当地政府就已经难以满足居民的用水需求。上个月，乌兰察布当地自来水公司被迫每晚关闭部分供水设施七小时，以缓解高峰时段的用水压力。虽然该市建设的数据中心在冬季对水的需求较少——乌兰察布当地政府的气象数据显示，它们每年仅需在两个月内额外用水进行冷却——但所有这些新基础设施仍可能对该地区构成严峻的环境挑战。
The Boonies / 偏远之地
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. 内蒙古作为数据中心热点地区至少已有十年历史，远在当前人工智能热潮之前。华为于 2016 年在乌兰察布建立了第一个数据中心，苹果公司三年后也紧随其后。2021 年，该地区被指定为国家级工程“东数西算”的主要枢纽之一，旨在将数据中心建设在中国西部腹地。
There was one major drawback, though. Because they are located far from China’s populous eastern coast, these data centers initially faced high latency rates when transferring data to the majority of users. As a result, they were initially largely relegated to backup storage—until AI gave them a new purpose. “With the rise of AI in 2022, there was the realization that actually, those remote data centers could be well-utilized for model training,” says Andrew Stokols, a professor at Singapore Management University who studies China’s compute infrastructure. A training run for an AI model can take months and doesn’t require much real-time tinkering, so latency is less of an issue. 然而，这里有一个主要缺陷。由于它们远离中国人口稠密的东部沿海地区，这些数据中心在向大多数用户传输数据时，最初面临着高延迟的问题。因此，它们起初大多被用于备份存储——直到人工智能赋予了它们新的使命。新加坡管理大学研究中国计算基础设施的教授安德鲁·斯托科尔斯（Andrew Stokols）表示：“随着 2022 年人工智能的兴起，人们意识到这些远程数据中心实际上可以很好地用于模型训练。”人工智能模型的训练过程可能需要数月时间，且不需要太多的实时干预，因此延迟问题的影响较小。
Relatively speaking, Ulanqab is also not really that far away. Inner Mongolia is much closer to Beijing and other major metropolitan areas in China than any Western data center hub is. And it’s now connected by two dedicated fiber optics cables built in 2017 and 2019 that reduced average latency speeds to less than five milliseconds, fast enough to support real-time data exchanges like AI inference. 相对而言，乌兰察布其实并没有那么远。与任何西方数据中心枢纽相比，内蒙古距离北京和其他中国主要大都市区要近得多。目前，它已通过 2017 年和 2019 年铺设的两条专用光缆连接，将平均延迟速度降低到 5 毫秒以下，足以支持人工智能推理等实时数据交换。
Compared to other data center hubs in China, Ulanqab’s growth seems to have been driven more by commercial demand than government-led investment, Stokols says. As Chinese AI startups like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and Zhiput AI have begun attracting more paying users at home, they have found a viable business case for inference data centers close enough to serve them without excessive latency. 斯托科尔斯认为，与其他中国数据中心枢纽相比，乌兰察布的增长似乎更多是由商业需求而非政府主导的投资所驱动的。随着深度求索（DeepSeek）、月之暗面（Moonshot AI）和智谱 AI 等中国人工智能初创公司开始在国内吸引更多付费用户，它们发现，建设足够近的推理数据中心以在不产生过度延迟的情况下服务用户，是一个可行的商业案例。
Powered by Renewables / 可再生能源驱动
The Chinese government is excited about building data centers in Inner Mongolia for another reason: It could help absorb the country’s excess capacity of renewable energy. Damien Ma, director of Carnegie China, a Singapore-based research center, says there’s a positive correlation between regions in China with the most unused renewable energy and those that have built the most data centers. 中国政府对在内蒙古建设数据中心感到兴奋的另一个原因是：这有助于消纳该国过剩的可再生能源产能。总部位于新加坡的研究中心卡内基中国（Carnegie China）主任马德斌（Damien Ma）表示，中国闲置可再生能源最多的地区与建设数据中心最多的地区之间存在正相关关系。
In the eyes of the government, this is a win-win strategy. China can catch up to pace of data center construction in the US, while simultaneously increasing demand for renewable energy. So it should come as no surprise that Envision, one of the largest Chinese manufacturers of wind turbines, announced this month that it will build a 2 gigawatt AI data center in Ulanqab connected directly to the company’s own clean power supply. 在政府看来，这是一个双赢的策略。中国既能赶上美国的数据中心建设步伐，又能同时增加对可再生能源的需求。因此，中国最大的风力涡轮机制造商之一远景能源（Envision）本月宣布将在乌兰察布建设一个 2 吉瓦的人工智能数据中心，并直接接入该公司自有的清洁能源供应，这也就不足为奇了。
But experts caution that looking at AI data centers and renewable energy in China as a match made in heaven is too simple of a story. Stokols found in his research that about 37 percent of electricity in Ulanqab still comes from coal. And since data centers need to run around the clock, operators have traditionally favored fossil fuels for their reliability. 但专家提醒说，将中国的人工智能数据中心与可再生能源视为“天作之合”过于简单化了。斯托科尔斯在研究中发现，乌兰察布约 37% 的电力仍来自煤炭。而且由于数据中心需要全天候运行，运营商传统上更倾向于使用化石燃料，因为它们更可靠。