China · OpenAI · Stargate · Wired
The Unlikely Place at the Center of China’s AI Boom
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Travel two hours west of Beijing by train, and you’ll find yourself surrounded by the rolling grasslands and ancient cinder cones of Inner Mongolia.
Key facts
- 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
- For comparison, OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate Project is set to reach only 10 gigawatts of total capacity when it’s complete
- 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
- 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
Summary
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 are flocking to Ulanqab for several reasons. 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. What’s also interesting is who is building these data centers. For years, Chinese AI companies have spent far less on building physical infrastructure than their American peers, despite developing several popular AI models with impressive capabilities. There’s one problem: finding enough water. Ulanqab is about as dry as Denver, getting only roughly 14 inches of rain each year.