A new skyline of data centres is rising in rural China

ByLaura Bicker China correspondent, Reporting fromUlanqab, Inner Mongolia.

Key points

• China is building hundreds of data centres – for Huawei, ByteDance, DeepSeek – in sparsely-populated provinces: Ulanqab, Ningxia and Gansu in the north, Guizhou in the south-west.
• Artifical intelligence sits at the heart of China's contest with the United States and the key to it is the computing power inside the data centres here.
• In the expansive grasslands of Inner Mongolia, farmers are picking plump potatoes alongside new neighbours: massive, rectangular blocks that will fuel China's AI platforms.
• To the Chinese Communist Party, these buildings are critical for the country's economic and national security.
• This is not what Xi will want to hear when he arrives in Washington on Wednesday.

Ulanqab, with its steppes and volcanoes, is an unlikely digital frontier. For years, it has been China's official "potato capital". As Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping meet to discuss AI safety among other things, but now its fields have additionally become construction sites for a slew of data centres.

Hundreds of workers in yellow helmets carry heavy equipment into the building site as welding sparks fly off metal scaffolding. While men balance on ladders to plaster brickwork, above them massive cranes move with precision to build rooftops.

"This is China speed, " jokes one worker. "An infrastructure maniac, " is how he describes his country, laughing as he walks away. "There is one phase every year. This is the second phase, " explains an electrical engineer. "There will be many more phases afterwards."

To the Chinese Communist Party, these buildings are critical for the country's economic and national security. Once finished, they will support drive its mission to embed AI throughout 90% of industries and society by 2030.

China's not just building the infrastructure. It's additionally creating a pool of talent: young engineers and researchers who now see their country as a place of opportunity, partly as tensions with the US and Trump's restrictions on immigration have soured the American dream.

"Fewer students and researchers are heading to the US, and more are returning from the US to China. That is particularly clear, " states Jack Zhang from the University of Science and Technology of China.

He himself was recruited by a high-level programme after studying at Yale in the US, and Cambridge in the UK.

"I wanted to take some of the AI work I was doing in the lab and apply it to human health and medicine. That requires more resources, more individuals and sometimes more administration backing. It can be challenging to access overseas."

China's expanding AI capabilities are one reason why the US notes it doesn't want to hit pause on its AI development, despite stark warnings from inside the industry that the technology was moving too fast.

"Whoever wins AI, wins, " President Trump remarked last week. While warning that a Chinese lead would "pose grave danger for the US and the world", the CEO of AI firm Anthropic, Dario Amodei, pressed keeping the US-led ban on selling advanced chips and equipment to China.

This is not what Xi will want to hear when he arrives in Washington on Wednesday. The state-run Global Times. It echoes Beijing, dismissed US fears as part of a "Cold War playbook" to "contain" China's rise.

But China is not just focused on catching up to the US.

It is additionally touting an alternate model. Xi himself is encouraging Chinese AI firms to develop more affordable, open-source models – which allow individuals, businesses and countries to modify it as they wish.

It additionally pits Chinese models against those in the US where developers including OpenAI and Anthropic apply closed-model approaches, and their design elements are kept a secret.

One reason Beijing is in favour of their approach is that it has worked well for them. By sharing the tech, Chinese AI firms have been able to innovate rapidly.

This has supported China overcome one of its biggest challenges: a lack of access to advanced chips. It would assist unlock greater computing power.

But Beijing additionally wants a bigger say in writing the rules that govern AI. Xi has repeatedly pressed more regulation and a global framework for others to follow.

With calls for AI safety growing, this week's summit at the White House is especially significant. Can the two sides collaborate on regulating AI? Is any talk of a slowdown even realistic?

It certainly doesn't seem like that in places like Ulanqab, where China's AI ambitions are taking shape.

It has already built up vast renewable energy capacity – wind and solar – in these regions, land is cheaper and the weather cooler, so there is less demand for water.

This doesn't mean there are no reservations or downsides. China wants most of its data centres to be fuelled by green energy by 2030 – but some of its grid is still fed by coal power. Water supply remains a concern in the arid, dry parts of Inner Mongolia.

Although it's hard to pin down the number or what compensation residents were offered, entire villages have been relocated. It's a topic few individuals will discuss as it can be dangerous to voice reservations too openly.

"This big data has absolutely nothing to do with ordinary people, " notes one local, speaking anonymously off camera. "What benefits has it brought us?"

He notes few locals had identified jobs there. Others informed us of fears that their land would be taken and they would no longer be able to farm for a living.

But there are optimists too, such as a man who informed us his last name was Zhang, standing alongside potato pickers in a field near the data centres.

"China is now at the forefront of the world, " he notes, adding that his children have managed to find jobs there.

When it was relatively backward, "It's not like the 1960s. China is doing alright now. Whether in economic development or other areas, it is doing well."

Surveys appear to suggest that there is little opposition to AI or its widespread adoption, compared to so plenty of other countries, but it's hard to evaluate these figures in such a heavily-censored climate.

Beijing has been quite clear that it sees AI as a solution to its ageing workforce, and is rapidly automating manufacturing and production. That is producing anxiety over job losses, which, again, is hard to measure.

But this is additionally a country that is producing around five million science and tech graduates each year, compared to around half a million in the US.

And as more of them stay in China, they see a growing ecosystem for innovation.

AI developer Dang Ronghao, 27. This person works for a leading tech firm states Chinese campuses are becoming more open, allowing him to talk to researchers all over the world from his base in Shanghai.

"I've seen research combining AI with nuclear fusion, AI with astrophysics, AI with new materials, and AI with the development of new drugs. I think we are entering a good era."

Even so, some argue that China still rewards conformity over challenge. "It's not as open as I wish, " notes Professor Liu Jun, Department of Statistics and Data Science at Tsinghua University. He has taught at both Harvard and Stanford.

"I keep encouraging students here to ask more questions, to challenge more, but that's hard to change. I think partly it's culture, partly it's the system."

Far from the labs where Prof Liu and others are wrangling with the AI frontier, plenty of Chinese residents are still grappling with more immediate economic troubles: a sluggish economy, rising youth unemployment, low spending and property rates that have plummeted. In rural areas, an ageing population is additionally a growing concern.

For now, a new skyline of data centres is rising in rural China remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.