Ulanqab lands $70B in data center bets by exploiting China's power grid loophole
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-09-12
- Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, has signed 100 data center projects worth over 500B yuan from Huawei, Alibaba, Apple, Kuaishou, DeepSeek and others; its compute capacity reached 172,000 P (8.7% of national total).
- The real draw is the independent West Inner Mongolia grid: stranded power sells at 0.33-0.36 yuan/kWh, roughly half market price, with flexible pricing and >86% green energy consumption.
- The piece cautions that compute infrastructure employs few locals (200-500 per mega site) and most value flows upstream to Nvidia (75% gross margin) and TSMC, leaving only 10-15% locally — echoing the resource-city trap.
- Ulanqab's opportunity: cheap tokens attract AI short-drama, autonomous driving training (276-day tasks cut to 11 hours) and film rendering workloads.
More from Infra
- Micron to nearly double HBM capacity to 100K wafers/month by year-end, challenging Samsung and SK Hynix — zephyr_z9 · 2026-09-12
- Wafer launches comprehensive AI performance engineering repo, starting with deep dive on Transformer inference — garrytan · 2026-09-12
- MiniMax H3 Director on a 16GB RTX 5060 Ti: 23-second video in 24 minutes — thatguyjames_uk · 2026-09-12
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash tech report: KV cache compression lets 552B beat 1.6T — 机器之心 · 2026-09-12
- How to run Solo Enterprise for agentgateway as a 3-node HA fleet on GCE — pjausovec · 2026-09-12
- Sandbox latency compounds into a hidden infra tax in coding-agent RL, Daytona intern finds — tw_killian · 2026-09-12