- China transforms agricultural land into data centers to compete with US AI -dominance
- WUHU’s project of $ 37 billion highlights Peking’s urgent speed in artificial intelligence
- Export restrictions let China be very dependent on less powerful local chips
China’s ambitions in artificial intelligence have gained new visibility through its plan to develop a domestic alternative to the massive project stargate pursued in the US by Openai and Oracle.
While the US initiative is expected to support up to two million AI chips, Beijing promotes his own version rooted in a $ 37 billion project in Wuhu.
Although far less than the $ 500 billion price tag associated with Stargate, the Chinese project is designed to consolidate the existing computer capacity for a more centralized network.
Wuhu project and its scale
The chosen place for this project is in Wuhu, eastern China, and it covers former rice fields along a 760 hectare island in the Yangtze River basin.
This country, once devoted to food production, is transformed into a “data island” for four of the country’s largest technology operators: Huawei, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.
By placing the new “mega -cluster” of data centers near major cities such as Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing, planners hope to provide faster inference services to close urban populations.
From 2022, China encouraged the construction of server companies in interior provinces with cheap power supplies.
Still, these places often sat inactive as local authorities redistributed capacity to areas where demand was higher.
The new plan is trying to solve it by attaching both urban and remote data centers through Huawei’s UB-Mesh technology.
This technology can provide redundancy while allowing unused calculation power to be sold.
The WUHU project’s subsidies, which are reportedly covering as much as 30% of AI -chip -purchasing costs, reflects further Peking’s urgent speed to make the new clusters in operation.
China currently has approx. 15% of the global AI calculation power, far less than the US estimated 75%.
Export restrictions have blocked access to advanced GPUs from Nvidia, leaving domestic suppliers unable to fully match foreign performance.
This hole has created incentives for smuggling hardware, although officials seem to be intentions to develop self-sufficient AI stacks to reduce the dependence on overseas sources.
The long-term goal is for such infrastructure to allow both companies and individuals to implement more sophisticated AI tools.
Whether local chips can support this ambition remains uncertain compared to Western opportunities that operate larger data centers abroad.
Conversion of agricultural land to server space raises questions about sustainability, resource allocation and energy needs.
Supporters consider the projects important to narrow the technological gap, while skeptics point out the cost of diverting agricultural land and the uncertainty of relying on less powerful local chips.
Via Toms hardware
