On August 22, 2026, the fourth annual Green Computing Power (Artificial Intelligence) Conference took place on the Cilechuan Grassland in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. The event highlighted the region's role in China's computing power strategy, with the release of the Green Computing Power Development Research Report (2026) and demonstrations of "millisecond-level urban computing" applications. Major companies, including ByteDance and Cambricon, signed agreements worth tens of billions of yuan to build green intelligent computing centers and token factories.
The conference underscored a pivotal shift: electricity costs now dominate data center operational expenses, making access to cheap, clean power a decisive factor in the industry's location choices. For example, the Hohhot Intelligent Computing Center, operated by China Mobile, spent approximately 290 million yuan on electricity in 2025, accounting for over 70% of its total operating costs. To address this, China's "East Data West Computing" project directs high-demand computing workloads to western regions rich in renewable energy. Hohhot, with its Horinger data center cluster, is one of the top ten national clusters.
Hohhot offers near-ideal conditions for data centers: an average annual temperature of 7°C and over 200 days suitable for outdoor air cooling, reducing cooling costs by more than 20%. At an electricity price of about 0.36 yuan per kilowatt-hour, a large-scale GPU cluster can save around 50 million yuan annually on power. Currently, Hohhot's total computing capacity reaches 150,000 P, with over 80% powered by green electricity.
The challenge lies in the intermittency of wind and solar power, while computing loads require uninterrupted 24/7 supply. The local solution is an innovative "computing-electricity synergy" mechanism. China Huadian Corporation has built a 360,000-kilowatt integrated wind-solar-storage power station, combining 300,000 kW of wind, 60,000 kW of photovoltaic, and 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 green energy is limited, storage discharges, the public grid supplements, and flexible tasks are deferred. This transforms power generation and consumption from a unidirectional supply model to a bidirectional interactive system.
On the consumption side, initiatives to minimize waste are also underway. The Hohhot data center operated by China Mobile recovers waste heat from nearby power plants to provide cooling for machine rooms. The B02 machine hall has improved its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) from 1.315 to 1.209, resulting in annual electricity savings of 560,000 kilowatt-hours since commencing operations. Upon full operation of two machine halls, annual savings are projected to reach 10 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and 150,000 tons of water.
Today, 62 computing center projects have clustered in Hohhot, including data centers of China's three major telecom operators, 16 financial institutions, and computing nodes from Huawei, ByteDance, Kuaishou, and others. Upstream, 45 manufacturing enterprises produce servers, cabinets, and sensors locally. According to the recently published three-year action plan, by 2028, Hohhot aims to establish 10 token factories capable of producing 20 trillion tokens daily. At that time, customers will procure not only cabinets and bandwidth but also directly accessible intelligent services customized to their requirements.
The prairie winds remain constant, as does the city's commitment to converting every kilowatt-hour of green electricity into stable and reliable computing power.
