Epoch AI: satellite imagery puts Huawei Horinger at ~286MW and a fraction of Colossus 2
kimmonismus · x · 2026-11-15
The full Epoch AI report behind the viral claim (Ben Cottier & Lynette Bye): Huawei's Horinger campus in Inner Mongolia is among China's largest AI data centers yet holds under one-tenth of xAI Colossus 2's compute, and projections show it staying far behind through at least 2028.
Key points:
- The campus spans West, South and North zones; satellite imagery shows villages demolished to make room, and Huawei docs indicate "hypernode" servers geared to large-model training and inference.
- Methodology: commercial high-res satellite images were used to identify cooling units' type, size and count; a heat-rejection model back-infers IT power capacity, capped at 286MW for AI.
- US export controls leave Huawei behind Nvidia on both chip performance and efficiency; China leverages abundant energy but can't match top US facilities' per-site compute near-term.
Related event: Huawei's Horinger AI compute is only about 7% of xAI Colossus 2(3 posts)→
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