Data centers - the new landscape of rural China
Author, Laura Beaker
Place of work, BBC China correspondent
Message Place, Ulanchab, Inner Mongolia
Published a minute ago
Reading time: 7 min
The original of this material in English can be read here.
On the vast steppes of Inner Mongolia, potato farmers have new neighbors: huge rectangular blocks that will power the growth of Chinese artificial intelligence platforms.
Ulanchab, with its steppes and volcanoes, is not the most obvious place for a digital revolution. For many years it was the official "potato capital" of China. But now, as Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet to discuss, among other things, the security of artificial intelligence, Wulanchub's potato fields are being transformed into construction sites for scores of data centers.
Hundreds of workers in yellow hard hats carry heavy equipment onto the construction site, welding sparks on metal scaffolding. Huge cranes move above them, erecting roofs, and workers balance on ladders to plaster the brickwork.
“This is Chinese speed,” jokes one of the workers. “Infrastructure mania,” he describes his country with a chuckle and leaves. “Every year there is one stage. This is the second stage, explains the electrical engineer. “There will be many more stages after this.”
At the heart of China's rivalry with the US is artificial intelligence, and the key to it is the computing power concentrated in these data centers.
The Chinese Communist Party views these structures as critical to the country's economic and national security. Once construction is completed, they will help achieve the goal of implementing AI in 90% of industries and areas of public life by 2030.
China doesn't just build infrastructure. It is also building a talent pool of young engineers and researchers who now see their country as a place of opportunity, in part because tensions with the United States and Trump's immigration restrictions have dimmed the American Dream.
“Fewer students and researchers are going to the US, and more are returning from the US to China. This is quite obvious,” says Jack Zhang from the University of Science and Technology of China.
He himself was recruited to high-level jobs after studying at Yale University in the US and Cambridge University in the UK.
“I wanted to take some of the AI work I was doing in the lab and apply it to health and medicine. This requires more resources, more people, and sometimes more government support, which can be difficult to obtain abroad,” he says.
China's expanding artificial intelligence capabilities are one reason the U.S. has been reluctant to slow down AI development, despite persistent industry warnings that the technology is moving too quickly.
“Whoever wins AI wins,” President Trump said last week. AI company Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for maintaining a US ban on the sale of advanced chips and equipment to China, while warning that China's leadership "poses a grave danger to the US and the world."
These are not the words Xi Jinping wanted to hear when he arrived in Washington on Wednesday. The state-run Global Times, reflecting Beijing's position, dismissed US concerns as part of a "Cold War scenario" aimed at "containing" China's rise.
However, China is not only focusing its efforts on catching up with the United States.
It also promotes an alternative model. Xi Jinping himself is encouraging Chinese companies to develop more accessible, open-source models that allow people, companies and countries to modify them as they see fit.
Chinese models compete with American ones, whose developers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, use proprietary model approaches whose source codes are classified.
One reason Beijing is sticking with its approach is that it has worked well. Thanks to technology sharing, Chinese AI companies have been able to quickly implement new technologies.
This has helped China overcome one of its biggest challenges: a lack of access to advanced chips that help unlock greater computing potential.
But Beijing is also keen to give its word more weight when crafting rules governing AI. Xi has repeatedly called for stronger regulation and the creation of a global framework that other countries can follow.
Amid growing calls for AI safety, this week's summit at the White House takes on added significance. Will both sides be able to cooperate in the field of AI regulation, and how realistic is talk about slowing down the pace of development of new technologies?
In places like Wulanchhab, where China's AI ambitions are taking shape, this is certainly far from reality.
China is building hundreds of data centers for the largest companies Huawei, ByteDance, DeepSeek in sparsely populated provinces: Wulanchub, Ningxia and Gansu in the north, Guizhou in the southwest.
These regions have already created huge capacities for the production of renewable energy - wind and solar; Land here is cheap and the climate is cooler, so there is less need for water.
This does not mean that this process does not have disadvantages. China aims to have the majority of its data centers powered by green energy by 2030—but parts of its grid are still powered by coal-fired power plants. Water supply in the arid areas of Inner Mongolia remains a challenge.
Authorities have resettled entire villages, although it is difficult to accurately determine the number or the amount of compensation offered to residents. Few people talk about this because voicing concerns too openly can be dangerous.
“This big data has absolutely nothing to do with ordinary people,” says one local resident, who wished to remain anonymous and not appear on camera. “How did this benefit us?”
He says few locals have found work there. Others told us of their fears that their land would be taken away and they would no longer be able to earn a living from farming.
But there are also optimists, such as a man who introduced himself as Zhang, whom we met next to farmers harvesting potatoes in a field near the data centers.
“China is now at the forefront of the world,” he says, adding that his children have managed to find work there.
“This is not the 1960s, when the country was relatively backward. China is doing well now. Whether it’s economic development or other areas, everything is going well.”
Polls seem to indicate that, unlike many other countries, there is little resistance to AI or its widespread adoption in China, but it is difficult to estimate these numbers in the face of such heavy censorship.
Beijing has made it quite clear that it sees AI as a solution to its aging workforce and is rapidly automating production. This raises concerns about job losses, which again are difficult to estimate.
But China is also a country that produces about five million science and technology graduates into its economy each year, compared with about half a million in the United States.
And as they increasingly remain in China, the new ecosystem provides them with room to innovate.
AI developer Dan Ronghao, 27, who works for a leading technology company, says Chinese universities are becoming more open, allowing him to connect with researchers from around the world without leaving Shanghai.
“I have seen research combining AI with nuclear fusion, AI with astrophysics, AI with new materials, and AI with new drug development. I think we are entering a wonderful era,” he says.
However, there is a perception that China still values conformity over challenge. “It’s not as open as I would like,” says Professor Liu Jun of the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Tsinghua University, who has taught at Harvard and Stanford. “I constantly encourage students here to ask more questions, to challenge more often, but it’s hard to change that.” I think partly it’s the culture, partly it’s the system.”
Away from the labs where Professor Liu and other scientists are grappling with problems on the cutting edge of AI, many Chinese are grappling with more pressing economic problems: a sluggish economy, rising youth unemployment, low consumption and plummeting property prices. In rural areas, population aging is also a growing concern.
His phone's screen is cracked, and he connects to the network through a pocket modem, for which he pays just over 40 yuan a month.
“For me, nothing has really changed. I don’t know what will happen in the future,” he says.
Such skepticism could pose a problem for Beijing.
Life is changing rapidly both in Ulanchab and throughout the country, but it is difficult to say how many people believe in this technological future as much as their leaders.
Download the new BBC World Service app!
When you first open the app, select "BBC News Russian Service" and receive notifications about important news, analysis, videos and podcasts.
