China's AI computing power landscape redrawn: Over half of new data center projects flock to northern and northwestern regions

Beating AI News Brief: China’s new AI computing power is clearly concentrating in northern and northwestern regions. BloombergNEF’s latest statistics show that over half of China’s under-construction and planned data center projects are located in northern and northwestern areas, including Inner Mongolia. According to its forecasts, by 2028, these regions will surpass traditional data center hubs like Beijing and Shanghai to become the country’s largest computing power supply zone. By 2030, northern and northwestern regions are projected to account for roughly one-third of China’s operational data centers’ IT capacity. These areas attract data centers mainly due to cheaper land and electricity costs, plus favorable climates for heat dissipation. AI firms including DeepSeek and Zhipu are also building large-scale data centers here. However, not all computing power will move westward. Latency-insensitive tasks such as model training and cloud storage are better suited for the west, while latency-sensitive use cases like autonomous driving still need to be close to eastern users.