Heading northwest out of Beijing, road travellers cross the Great Wall after roughly four hours before the terrain opens into the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Where grasslands once defined a region long associated with potato farming, construction cranes now punctuate the horizon as data centres take shape and several of the country's largest technology firms establish a presence.

Ulanqab, a city in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, has drawn attention as a location where demand for computing infrastructure has been growing rapidly. By August 2026, the volume of computing power concentrated across Inner Mongolia's data centre network had climbed to 363,000 petaflops — a figure roughly four times what the region recorded fewer than two years prior.

Ambient temperatures there allow server racks handling AI workloads to shed heat without mechanical cooling for roughly ten months out of every twelve. Flat, open terrain across the region generates enough wind and solar energy to push electricity prices down to roughly 0.35 yuan — approximately 5.2 U.S. cents — per kilowatt-hour.

Sitting roughly 30 kilometres from Beijing, the facility keeps data-transfer delays below five milliseconds — a tight enough window to support both model training workloads and inference tasks running in real time. Efforts to climb toward higher-value industries have placed the area at the intersection of green computing, token trading, and artificial intelligence applications.

Three boulevards inside the Ulanqab Chahar High Tech Development Zone carry the names of Apple, Alibaba, and Huawei — each street a marker of where those corporations have planted operations within the zone. Three other technology companies — ByteDance, Kuaishou, and VNET Group — have established operations in the area.

Liu Junping, deputy director of the development zone's administrative committee, noted that 22 computing-power projects are currently under construction within the high-tech zone alone, drawing a workforce of nearly 30,000 builders. Zhou Yiguang, an executive at VNET Group's Ulanqab facility, described the site as largely barren and occasionally swept by sandstorms when he first visited to assess it in 2022.

A computing cluster stretching across roughly 73 hectares — equivalent to about 1,100 mu — took shape in Ulanqab under the group's development plans, with the opening phase having been up and running since October 2024. By the midpoint of 2026, approximately two-thirds of China's thirty top privately held computing firms had put down roots across the area, with their pooled financial commitments reaching beyond 200 billion yuan — equivalent to roughly 29.75 billion US dollars.

Among the country's ten leading computing service providers, nine had already moved to establish a presence in that location. Electricity drawn by Ulanqab's computing sector reached 4.3 billion kilowatt-hours over the course of 2025. Projections place that number at 9 billion kWh by 2026, with further growth anticipated as additional computing centres are scheduled to come online across the following two to three years.

Construction of a zero-carbon industrial facility is under way within the Ulanqab Chahar High Tech Development Zone. Wind and solar installations built jointly under government oversight will feed into a shared energy distribution network, with electricity from those renewable sources allocated to each computing centre operating within the park.

According to Chen Zhigang, who holds a deputy director post at the Ulanqab municipal development and reform commission, roughly 10 gigawatts of untapped wind and solar capacity lie within the areas bordering the park. Developed fully, those reserves hold the capacity to supply upwards of 30 billion kWh worth of electrical output each year. Once the zero-carbon industrial park reaches full operation, projections indicate that renewable sources will supply over 80 percent of its total power needs.

Renewable sources account for 85 percent of the electricity drawn by data centres currently running within Hohhot's Horinger New Area. Fluorine-pump units that operate without water intake, along with closed-loop tower designs, have drawn down the strain on industrial cooling water supplies.

According to a company representative, reclaimed water accounts for all cooling-related water consumption at the facility, which draws on outdoor cold air for roughly ten months annually, with spray systems brought into service only when summer temperatures peak. Li Yi, who serves as technical director at VNET Group's Ulanqab facility, noted that neither local surface water supplies nor underground water reserves are affected by the operation. Local rules bar data centres from drawing on groundwater to meet their cooling needs.

Throughout 2025, data-intensive firms operating across the city drew a combined 1.54 million cubic metres of water — a volume that represented just 0.33 percent of all water used citywide. Ulanqab's annual output of reclaimed water stands at roughly 72 million tonnes.

Liu Huansuo, deputy director of the city's big data administration, cautioned that an overreliance on low-cost electricity and affordable land could leave the area functioning as little more than a passive host for server infrastructure. Revenue flowing through the city's computing-power sector reached 6.835 billion yuan across 2025, with tax contributions from that activity totalling 368 million yuan. Each 100 mu (roughly 6.7 hectares) of land dedicated to a computing facility is projected to support around 100 positions.

A green-computing facility described as the country's first full-stack AI token-trading platform opened within the Horinger New Area on 30 May, with the launch placing Hohhot among the northern Chinese cities seeking to establish themselves as centres for token-exchange activity. Converting raw computing power into a tradable commodity — one that can be measured, assigned a price, and eventually leveraged to deliver higher-value AI services — is the underlying objective, according to Guo Juying, who serves as deputy director of the Horinger New Area Administrative Committee.

Guo described the shift as a departure from electricity as the primary commodity toward tokens — a unit of exchange that arises from how AI systems operate, since every model inference and conversational query ultimately resolves into a measurable count of tokens both generated and consumed.

Toward the close of 2025, Ulanqab put forward a three-year roadmap covering 2026 through 2028 that sets out plans to establish the city as a hub for token-related activity, with an envisioned economic framework connecting the production, exchange, and use of tokens. Close to a hundred use cases have taken shape across Hohhot's dairy, new energy, and biomedicine industries. Biometric identification technology for livestock has found broad uptake across digitally managed grazing operations.