Ulanqab transforms its harsh climate into a green computing hub
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The city of Ulanqab in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is transitioning from a traditional agricultural center into a major computing hub for artificial intelligence and cloud services.
The region previously faced economic limitations due to its harsh winters and low rainfall, which restricted farming and livestock production. However, the city is now leveraging these geographic traits to meet the high electricity and cooling demands of data centers.
Local authorities and developers are using the area's abundant wind and solar resources to power a growing infrastructure of server racks and computing capacity. Ulanqab's natural environment provides a significant advantage for cooling large-scale computing facilities. The city maintains an average summer temperature of 18.8 degrees Celsius and experiences natural cooling for nearly 10 months of the year. These conditions allow data centers to use outdoor air to dissipate heat, which reduces energy consumption by an estimated 30 percent.
While the city is located over 300 kilometers from Beijing, it remains connected to the capital via a 144-fiber, dual-route link. This infrastructure allows data to travel the distance in 2.1 milliseconds. The city has already secured agreements for 109 computing projects, supporting more than 7 million standard server racks. This development is helping the region meet the demand for AI training and big data processing in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area.
