Recently, East Fishkill, a small village in northern New York, USA, issued a ban on the construction of any new data centers within three years. This technology town, which has been manufacturing chips for IBM for 50 years, suddenly hit the brakes.
It’s not that it doesn’t want to develop, but a large-scale power shortage is restricting the development of AI in the United States.
On the other side of the world, on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia at almost the same latitude, a completely opposite scene is taking place. Windmills are turning at the foot of the mountain, photovoltaic panels are spreading to the sky, green electricity is pouring into the computer room, and data calculations are going on non-stop.
Also making a fuss about computing power, Ulanqab, a small town that once had potatoes as its industry, is now making the world's most "powerful" business a success.
Leading companies such as Huawei, Alibaba, Apple, Kuaishou, and Byte have successively settled in, and have signed a total of 109 computing power center projects. As of August 2026, the computing power scale will reach 190,000P. Goldman Sachs commented that it has emerged as one of the largest and fastest-growing AI computing power clusters in the Asia-Pacific.
A grassland once famous for potatoes is now "grazing" computing power. In the process of turning wind, cold and grass into the hard currency of computing power, Ulanqab has made three moves.
The first step is resource chess.
Electricity is the foundation of computing power construction. Ulanqab is located at the northern foot of Yinshan Mountain and is rich in wind and solar resources. The city's new energy grid-connected installed capacity exceeds 20 million kilowatts, and green power accounts for about 67%.
Abundant resources provide an advantage in electricity prices. The household electricity price of the Ulanqab computing power project is stable at about 0.32-0.36 yuan/kWh. Compared with the industrial electricity price of about 0.7-0.8 yuan in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, it is almost half less.
The second step is industrial chess.
With electricity, Ulanqab takes advantage of its climate and location to make industrial contributions.
The average annual temperature is 4.3°C, and natural cooling sources have been available for the past 10 months, which saves a lot of cooling and cooling costs in the data center. The location advantage of 240 kilometers away from Beijing reduces the measured one-way delay of data transmission to 2.1 milliseconds.
The computing power in the east is overflowing, and it will be implemented nearby. Model training, cloud storage, autonomous driving deduction, batches of "big electricity consumers" have settled here, and the computing power scale has increased to 190,000P.
The third step is value chess.
As the AI industry develops in depth, Ulanqab, which started out as a power generation and data center, is no longer satisfied with just selling electricity and leasing cabinets.
In November 2025, Ulanqab officially launched a three-year action plan to build a "token capital" to create a closed loop of "wind and solar power generation - green computing power - token value output". During the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, it will cultivate the production, measurement, evaluation, safety and other aspects of word yuan, and promote the construction of word yuan trading platform.
Token is the smallest unit of measurement in the large model world. Since 2024, China’s average daily token calls have surged from 100 billion to 500 trillion. From "selling resources" to "selling computing power" to "selling words", what Ulanqab wants to do is to take a step further in this industrial value chain.
The computing power network is one of the "six networks" planned and constructed by the country, and the computing power industry is in an accelerated development stage.
From the layout of a data center in 2013, to being included in the "Eastern Digital and Western Computing" hub in 2022, and then to the construction of the "Token Capital", Ulanqab has gradually moved from a small town that relied on potatoes, cattle and sheep to support its family in the last century, to the center stage of global AI computing power competition.
This is the epitome of a city's "new" development, and it is also a footnote to China's promotion of high-quality development based on local conditions.
Looking across the country from Ulanqab, the “Eastern Data and Western Computing” project has laid out eight national computing power hubs and 10 national data center clusters. The country’s first comprehensive big data pilot zone in Guizhou, the national data center cluster in Shaoguan, Guangdong, and the large-scale green electricity direct supply project in Zhongwei, Ningxia... all regions are relying on their resource endowments to find new development paths.
At both ends of the earth, there are two choices and two endings: one side is worried about electricity, and emerging industries press the pause button; the other side is devoted to electricity and sows computing power into the grassland.
While the United States is still fighting for power supply in small villages, new momentum in the AI era is accelerating in China's grasslands.
