China’s north and northwest already hold majority of computing capacity, to surpass Beijing by 2028

China is executing one of the most ambitious infrastructure reshuffles in modern tech history, and the winners are cities most people outside the country have never heard of. More than half of China’s data center capacity now sits in its northern and northwestern regions, and those areas are on track to surpass Beijing’s computing dominance by 2028. The engine behind this migration has a name: “Eastern Data, Western Computing,” or EDWC. Launched in February 2022, the national strategy is designed to push large-scale computing workloads, particularly AI training, away from congested eastern megacities and into regions where land is plentiful, electricity is cheap, and renewable energy is abundant. The new capitals of compute Ulanqab, a city in Inner Mongolia, has emerged as perhaps the most consequential node in this network. The city has racked up commitments for 12.5 GW of data center capacity, with roughly 70% of those announcements coming in the past year alone. The Envision Group’s Galaxy Campus in Ulanqab is planned with a capacity of 2 GW and up to 1 million GPUs, with over 80% of its power sourced from renewables. DeepSeek, the AI lab that grabbed global attention earlier th...