A Chinese prairie city's 12.5 GW data center plan surpasses OpenAI's Stargate
China's AI compute is pouring into Ulanqab, a city on the Inner Mongolian prairie.
Goldman Sachs data puts the city's data center capacity commitments — operational, under construction, and planned — at roughly 12.5 GW. That's more than the 10 GW target OpenAI originally set for Stargate, though only about 1.2 GW is actually live today.
The expansion has come almost entirely in the last year. More than 70 percent of Ulanqab's committed capacity has been added in that time. DeepSeek plans to build about 1 GW of data center capacity, Xiaohongshu (China's Instagram-like app) is reportedly considering a 600 MW project, and ByteDance and Alibaba have already moved in.
Land is cheap, electricity is cheap, the weather is cold, and the city sits close enough to Beijing. Dedicated fiber has pushed average latency between Ulanqab and Beijing to under 5 milliseconds.