HOHHOT, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- Ulanqab, in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, has long been known as the home of the potato. Now the grassland city has become a factory for AI tokens, which stream along an invisible "information superhighway" to Beijing.
An advanced optical cable runs directly to the capital, with a measured one-way data transmission latency of just 2.1 milliseconds, making several hundred kilometers in between almost imperceptible.
A Goldman Sachs report says that Ulanqab has emerged as one of the largest and fastest-growing AI computing clusters in the Asia-Pacific region, with a number of leading companies setting up operations here.
The appeal is partly geographic. Inner Mongolia enjoys a climate that allows natural cooling for nearly 10 months a year, vast land that can support gigawatt-scale computing projects, abundant green power, and proximity to the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, with network latency within 5 milliseconds.
COMPUTING LEAP
"When I came here to scout a site in 2022, the area was relatively desolate," recalled Zhou Yiguang, director of the resource development department at the Ulanqab base of VNET Group, a cyberspace infrastructure service provider.
Today, VNET's projects in Ulanqab have a planned total land area of 1,100 mu (about 73.3 hectares), the equivalent of more than 100 football fields, and a total IT capacity of about 1.3 gigawatts, capable of supporting computing cluster deployment at the million-card scale.
In November 2025, Ulanqab launched a three-year action plan to build a "token city," aiming to create a complete industrial chain of "wind and solar power generation, green computing power and token value output."
The city has now taken on 75,000 petaflops of computing workloads from Beijing, supporting large-model training for leading companies such as ByteDance, DeepSeek and Baidu. These resources power applications across cutting-edge fields such as computer vision, autonomous driving, and film and television rendering.
The city's operational computing capacity has reached 190,000 petaflops, with intelligent computing accounting for more than 90 percent of the total.
In the first half of 2026, Ulanqab's fixed-asset investment, electricity consumption and revenue in the computing power industry grew by 39 percent, 90 percent and 12 percent year- on-year, respectively, according to the official data.
Inner Mongolia has rolled out a package of policies to support the development of data and AI, the token economy, and the green computing power industry.
By June, 20 of China's 30 leading private companies in the computing power industry had established a presence in Inner Mongolia, with total investment exceeding 200 billion yuan (about 30 billion U.S. dollars). By August, the total computing power of Inner Mongolia had reached 363,000 petaflops, nearly quadrupling in less than two years.
BROAD TALENT DEMAND
Ulanqab has attracted more than 100 data center projects, and the computing boom has created strong demand for professionals in infrastructure operations and maintenance.
Chen Gang, 23, is a local of Ulanqab and works as a technician at a data center, handling cutting-edge equipment every day. But two years ago, he was still uncertain about his future.
For generations, a lot of locals made a living by growing potatoes. Many young people left to find work elsewhere, and Chen once worked as a hotel waiter in Qingdao, east China's Shandong Province.
Watching the data industry take off in his hometown, Chen decided to seize the opportunity. He quit his job and returned to Ulanqab, enrolled in a local training program and then got hired by a data center.
Chen's core work is routine inspection, to ensure that power supply, cooling and server room equipment are running safely. That requires a solid command of electrical systems, heating, ventilation and air conditioning, low-voltage systems and fire protection.
In 2026, more than 20 computing power companies have set up operations in Ulanqab, drawing more young people back home.
The industry-education integration base for computing power and AI in Inner Mongolia, which pairs computing power centers with vocational training, has trained more than 2,000 AI professionals.
By March 2026, China's average daily AI token calls had surged from about 100 billion in early 2024 to 140 trillion. These young people, like Chen, are stepping into a new stage of the computing power industry, where value is measured in AI tokens. ■
