Quant funds flock to Wulanchabu as 8-GPU A100 servers triple to $170K
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-10-22
A deep dive by Yuanchan Review into quant funds' compute arms race. A Goldman Sachs report calls Wulanchabu one of Asia-Pacific's largest and fastest-growing AI compute clusters; per Bloomberg, DeepSeek plans a 1GW datacenter there with at least 160K Huawei Ascend 950DT chips. Beyond DeepSeek/High-Flyer, quant funds like Jiukun and Lingjun have moved in.
Soaring GPU prices
- 8-GPU A100 servers went from 400K to 1.2M+ RMB in a year; B300 servers resell at 25M RMB vs $550K factory price, with one reseller reportedly making 140M RMB on 74 units.
- Latecomers resort to gray-market channels or pulling cards from Dell/Lenovo machines (low-power RTX 4500 favored for office towers).
- Spare compute is a second revenue line: monthly rental for an 8-GPU A100 box rose from 30-40K to 80K RMB.
Cost-cutting playbook
- Wulanchabu offers cheap wind/coal power (private-mine rates can be 1/10 of Shanghai commercial electricity) and natural cooling at 4.3°C average; Envision's 80%-green Star River base is fully booked.
- Self-build requires land, energy permits, and 18+ months — most rent instead.
- Extreme optimization: one small fund chained MacBooks over Thunderbolt for 512GB unified memory at 1/10 the cost; Diewei Capital claims 1/5 the cost for 80% of the performance of a 16M RMB 2PB storage cluster via engineering optimization.
The piece closes on a Red Queen effect: quant firms face their own scaling law, and compute scale is now the industry's most tangible proof of strength.
More from Venture
- AI stock basket plunges dotcom-style: AMD -9.3%, CRWV -9.7%, ORCL -4.7% in broad selloff — SumitGup · 2026-10-23
- OpenAI nears up to $30B round at $1.25T valuation led by UAE investors — kimmonismus · 2026-10-23
- OpenAI nears up to $30B funding round at $1.25 trillion valuation — kimmonismus · 2026-10-23
- Formic raises $50M Series B to scale physical AI across 100+ US factories — garrytan · 2026-10-23
- Trader dismisses AI circular financing theory: every new megawatt booked at rising spot prices — JOBhakdi · 2026-10-23
- How Hyperscalers Ensure Middlemen Die First When the AI Bubble Bursts — mattwbaker · 2026-10-23