Source: Wired
Ulanqab has become China's preferred location for new data center capacity because it offers the triumvirate that makes hyperscale infrastructure economical: coal-powered electricity at a fraction of coastal rates, vast undeveloped land, and still-reasonable latency to Beijing's tech market and regulators. AI training and inference workloads are moving compute away from expensive coastal tech hubs toward resource-rich inland provinces. This pattern mirrors but inverts Western hyperscaler logic of clustering near urban demand.