China’s data-center boom thrives in remote locations, sidestepping land and power constraints

While data center developers in Europe and the US wrestle with NIMBYism, grid bottlenecks, and eye-watering land costs near major metros, China has taken a different approach: build where almost nobody lives. Over 50% of China’s forthcoming data center projects are now located in the country’s northern and northwestern regions, according to BloombergNEF data as of September 2026. The shift is the product of a deliberate government initiative called “Eastern Data, Western Computing,” launched in the 2021-2022 period, which funnels new computing capacity toward areas with cheap power, cooler climates, and vast tracts of open land. The Ulanqab phenomenon No city better illustrates the strategy than Ulanqab, a prefecture-level city in Inner Mongolia. Since 2016, nearly 100 data center facilities have either been completed or are under construction there, collectively representing 12.5 gigawatts of pledged capacity. A substantial chunk of those commitments came in just the past year alone. The list of tenants reads like a who’s who of Chinese tech: Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance are all expanding in the area, with ByteDance alone scaling up by 5-6 GW in Ulanqab. DeepSeek, the AI startu...