The fourth annual Green Computing Power (Artificial Intelligence) Conference convened on August 22, 2026, on the Cilechuan Grassland in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, drawing attention to the region's strategic importance in China's computing power landscape. With the theme "Building Synergy between Computing and Electricity, Exploring New Horizons in Token Economy, and Creating the Future of Artificial Intelligence Together," the event released the Green Computing Power Development Research Report (2026) and highlighted pilot projects such as "millisecond-level urban computing." Major companies like ByteDance and Cambricon signed agreements valued at tens of billions of yuan to develop green intelligent computing centers and token factories.
The conference's location was no coincidence. Hohhot has become a focal point for national computing power initiatives, primarily due to its abundant renewable energy resources and favorable climate. The area's wind turbines generate clean electricity that is transmitted via a dedicated 41-kilometer line to data centers, bypassing the public grid. This setup powers thousands of GPUs that run AI training models around the clock. For instance, the Hohhot Intelligent Computing Center operated by China Mobile spent approximately 290 million yuan on electricity in 2025, accounting for over 70% of its operating costs. Such high energy consumption makes electricity prices a decisive factor in computing power economics.
China's "East Data West Computing" project aims to address this by routing data processing tasks from the east to resource-rich western regions. Hohhot's Horinger data center cluster is one of the top ten nationally, benefiting from an average annual temperature of 7°C and more than 200 days suitable for free-air cooling, reducing cooling costs by over 20%. With electricity priced at about 0.36 yuan per kilowatt-hour, a large-scale GPU cluster can save around 50 million yuan annually. Currently, Hohhot's computing capacity exceeds 150,000 petaflops, with over 80% of its energy coming from green sources.
However, the intermittent nature of wind and solar power poses a challenge to the continuous operation of data centers. To address this, Hohhot has implemented an innovative "computing-electricity synergy" mechanism. China Huadian Corporation has built a 360,000-kilowatt integrated wind-solar-storage station, featuring 300,000 kilowatts of wind, 60,000 kilowatts of photovoltaic, and battery storage capable of four-hour regulation. A collaborative control platform collects data on wind output, solar irradiance, storage status, and computing load at millisecond intervals to dynamically allocate power: when green energy is abundant, storage charges and delay-tolerant tasks are prioritized; when it is scarce, storage discharges, the grid supplies supplementary power, and flexible tasks are deferred. This transforms the traditional unidirectional power supply into a bidirectional interactive system.
On the consumption side, efficiency measures are also in place. The China Mobile data center recovers waste heat from nearby power plants for cooling. The B02 machine hall has improved its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) from 1.315 to 1.209, saving 560,000 kilowatt-hours annually since operations began. Once both machine halls are fully operational, annual savings are projected to reach 10 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and 150,000 tons of water.
Today, Hohhot hosts 62 computing center projects, including data centers from China's three major telecom operators, 16 financial institutions, and computing nodes from Huawei, ByteDance, and Kuaishou. Upstream, 45 manufacturing enterprises produce servers, cabinets, and sensors locally. According to a recently published three-year action plan, by 2028 Hohhot aims to establish 10 token factories capable of producing 20 trillion tokens daily. This would enable customers to procure not just infrastructure but directly accessible intelligent services tailored to their needs.
The prairie winds continue to blow, and Hohhot remains committed to converting every kilowatt-hour of green electricity into stable, reliable computing power, positioning itself as a cornerstone of China's AI infrastructure.
