On land formerly used to grow potatoes, giant gray concrete building blocks rise outside the city that has long been a backwater. Cattle, sheep and the potato farms were the hallmarks of Ulanqab - until it all started to be about AI.
Today, lifting cranes can be seen everywhere. Cui Hong sees them when he herds his cows, Gao when she serves lunch to construction workers at her simple outdoor restaurant on a road between the server halls.
A construction boom prevails on these expanses in the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia 30 miles west of Beijing. China is now doing what it does best: building infrastructure - to start tapping into the US in the number of data center facilities.
This is a part of China that has been estimated to have the world's largest local electricity overcapacity. China currently produces 2.5 times as much electricity as the United States. An abundance of cheap green energy, wind and solar power is the country's advantage in the AI race.
The major disadvantage is the lack of the best American semiconductors, which the US restricts exports of. It is the single most important factor in developing AI, but China is now trying to compensate by building infrastructure and speeding up the production of its own advanced chips.
So far, agreements for 109 data centers have been signed in Ulanqab. Some server halls are already ready. Work is ongoing in many. On the facades are the names of China's biggest tech giants: "Huawei", "Tencent", "Deepseek" and many more.
This is one of Asia's fastest-growing centers for data and AI, according to a report by international investment bank Goldman Sachs.
In June, the city had signed agreements with data centers that included a future capacity of 12.5 gigawatts. It's a number that makes experts panic.
Zhang Peng, a construction worker from a southern province, doesn't know how to interpret the numbers, but he trusts what he sees with his own eyes.
- This will be fantastic when it is finished, he says during a break in the work.
A month ago, he took the car to Ulanqab and got a job right away. He has made it his lifestyle to travel between locations where the demand for construction workers is greatest. First it was apartments, then came the real estate crisis, and now it's data centers that are being built at breakneck speed in various places in the country.
On the roads between the server halls in Ulanqab, there are cars parked with license plates from many provinces. There is gossip about how common it has become for China's construction workers to take their cars to wherever the jobs are.
- It is convenient to be able to drive yourself here when you are not working overtime and are free. And I like to sit in the car and rest when I have my lunch break.
Zhang Peng is satisfied with his salary of the equivalent of SEK 15,000 a month. Thousands of people, residents and visitors alike, have been caught up in the rush around the data facilities.
Gao, runs the simplest possible restaurant with her husband. They serve lunch to the construction workers from large troughs on the side of a road: chicken, pork and unlimited vegetables, and of course – potatoes.
The furniture consists of low stools and wooden boards that they put as table tops between plastic trays. When the lunch rush is over, they pack everything into their van and go to buy the ingredients for tomorrow's lunch.
- Tomorrow morning we get up early and start cooking. We only charge 12 yuan for a lunch (18 kroner). It is the large number of diners that makes this work better than when we had a restaurant, she says.
The transformation is total in Ulanqab. For generations, agriculture was hampered by the harsh climate. Cold winters and scant rainfall made the growing season short. The city was once featured in a campaign to alleviate poverty in China, according to state Chinese media.
At that time, the cold strong winds of the steppe also penetrated the bones and marrow of the inhabitants, just as they do today, but then they blew by without being taken advantage of. Now large parks of wind turbines spin nearby.
In June, Inner Mongolia had wind turbines that, if fully utilized, could generate 117 gigawatts, the largest capacity in China. Here there are large parks of solar panels and huge resources of coal. Much of the energy has not been used. The data centers will soon change that.
The leadership in Beijing this year has called for the coordinated development of data capacity and electricity to speed up the expansion of the infrastructure needed for AI.
The data centers in Ulanqab have access to electricity that is among the cheapest in the country, paying around the equivalent of 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to Zhao Gang, an expert on AI economics and founder of consultancy Saizhi. This compared to double the price in Beijing.
- Whoever produces cheap, green energy sustainably is also the one who will master large-scale AI training best, reads his conclusion.
Another advantage is the cold climate of the resort. When the electricity is used for computers in server halls, heat is produced as a side effect, which must be removed. In Ulanqab, the cooling takes place during large parts of the year in a natural way with the help of the winds outside the knot, instead of with systems that draw unnecessary energy. The average annual temperature is 4.3 degrees.
Ten years ago, fiber optic cables began to be installed between Ulanqab and Beijing, which made the transfer of data faster. That and the relative proximity to the capital are further advantages.
When Beijingers ask questions to get AI answers, everything is now set for the facilities in Ulanqab to contribute to the answers.
It starts with the winds across the steppe. They speed up the wind turbines, which generate electricity, which power the computers, which ensure that the AI answer appears on a screen.
Cattle breeder Cui Hong shakes his head. He herds his cows in a field near the site where a renewable energy company is building a huge plant.
He has never used AI. No internet either.
- I don't know what's the use of all this? he says. No one from here gets a job. The construction workers come from other provinces. And to be employed when all is said and done, you must have education.
In the US, people are protesting against the server halls. In China, residents know that it is futile to demonstrate against the authorities' decisions. So when China expands, it usually comes at the expense of residents like Cui Hong, who are forced to move from their villages.
- But I still live, they build where there were potato fields, not where we have our houses, he says.
