This small Inner Mongolian city that made its name selling potatoes has siphoned off tens of billions of yuan from Alibaba and Huawei.

In April this year, a third city besides Beijing and Hangzhou appeared on DeepSeek's recruitment page for the first time: Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia.

With a monthly salary ranging from 15,000 to 30,000 yuan, you can work there as a senior operation and maintenance engineer at the data center.

"30,000 yuan per month, go to the Inner Mongolia grassland to guard the computer room." This message quickly went viral online.

Recently, there has been news that DeepSeek is preparing to continue heavy investment in Ulanqab. Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek plans to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips in a data center in Ulanqab for model inference.

Not only DeepSeek, but almost all well-known domestic tech giants have spent lavishly in Ulanqab, such as Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, ByteDance... As of the end of June 2026, the city has signed 89 data center projects involving 68 enterprises, with a total investment exceeding 500 billion yuan.

Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg and Wired all mentioned Ulanqab when discussing China's AI sector. Goldman Sachs also released a special report stating that Ulanqab has emerged as "one of the largest and fastest-growing AI computing power clusters in the Asia-Pacific region".

The Unexpected Hub of China's AI Boom

In addition, some international investment institutions even check the monthly power consumption of local data centers here to track how fast China's AI computing power is growing.

In the past, the most famous product of this land was potatoes, and Ulanqab's potatoes were essential for McDonald's and KFC to make French fries.

Looking back now, the leap of Ulanqab from making a living off the land to being a "computing power heart" may seem dramatic, but it is extremely high in value.

The overtaking at the curve that Ulanqab has waited 13 years for,

has finally arrived.

Ulanqab, a small city with a population of only 2 million in central Inner Mongolia, was once labeled as an agricultural and pastoral area with strong winds and poverty.

Local people joke that the place only has two wind seasons a year, each lasting for half a year.

In 2003, the GDP of Ulanqab was only 13.3 billion yuan. By 2019, it ranked 8th among the 12 leagues and cities in Inner Mongolia. During the poverty alleviation campaign, 8 of the 11 banners and counties in the city were state-level poverty-stricken banners and counties.

In the past, it only had two impressive business cards: the first was potato, it won the title of "China's Potato Capital" in 2009, and its planting area has long been stable at about 4 million mu, accounting for about 6% of the total national output; the second was ferroalloy, Ulanqab is the largest prefecture-level city producing ferroalloy in China.

Local people never imagined that Ulanqab would one day be deeply connected to cutting-edge high technology.

In 2013, when Huawei first arrived, even local cadres were very unfamiliar with the concept of "big data", but they were excited about the arrival of large enterprises. "Huawei kept popularizing knowledge to all departments, letting everyone accept the new industry and recognize their own advantages."

In the eyes of many confused local residents, the agreement signed that year was just another project coming to enclose land. Unexpectedly, more and more tech giants came one after another, and after more than ten years, great changes have taken place.

By the end of June this year, 86 of these projects are intelligent computing centers. The operating scale of computing power has reached 165,000 P (1P is equivalent to 1,000 trillion calculations per second), intelligent computing power accounts for more than 90% of the total, accounting for 8.7% of the national total, and the year-end target is to exceed 200,000 P.

How determined the tech giants are to come here to make use of the cool wind can be seen from the investment intensity of a single project.

Alibaba's total planned investment in Ulanqab exceeds 10 billion yuan, and its information port company has a paid-in capital of 3.5 billion yuan; GDS signed a contract with the local government in June 2026, planning to invest more than 300 billion yuan in five years, and explicitly build a gigawatt-level park.

According to Goldman Sachs' report data, as of the end of June this year, the total capacity of data centers already in operation and planned here is about 12.5GW.

What is the concept of 12.5GW? When 1GW is running at full load, its power demand is equivalent to that of 750,000 households. And 12.5GW is more than 10 times the local operating scale in 2025.

This city, which has long been dominated by agriculture and animal husbandry, has ushered in a transformative makeover.

On the sandy wasteland that no one wanted in the past, many valuable computer rooms have been built.

The main roads in the Chahar High-tech Zone are directly named "Huawei Avenue", "Apple Avenue" and "Alibaba Avenue". Driving around the zone, you can see the offices of almost all top Chinese tech giants. Local taxi drivers are already very familiar with which building belongs to Huawei and which belongs to Alibaba.

There is also a very intuitive change reflected on the electricity meters. From January to July 2026, the power consumption of data centers accounted for 7.3% of the city's total electricity consumption. According to data from Tianyancha, in the past year, Ulanqab has added more than 100 information technology service enterprises with registered capital of over 1 million yuan, and more than 40 new enterprises in the power industry.

From selling potatoes to selling electricity, Ulanqab has also gained a new identity: the Capital of Token.

From the Potato Capital to the "Capital of Token",

it is not only relying on "natural endowments"

Elon Musk once said: "The end of AI is electricity."

Not only servers consume electricity, but cooling servers also consume electricity, and the power consumption of the two is almost the same.

Therefore, traditional data centers are "high land occupation, high power consumption, and high water consumption", and the water consumed is mainly used for cooling systems. Some people describe that when you use Doubao to generate a work report, Doubao will "drink" about 500 milliliters of water.

In order to prevent the servers from being burned out, some tech giants sink their data centers into the seabed, and some place their computer rooms in the caves of Guizhou.

In Ulanqab, the solution is much simpler: open the windows.

The city has an average annual temperature of 4.3℃, and the average temperature in summer is 18.8℃. It can use natural cold sources to cool the computer rooms for nearly 10 months a year. Under the same technical conditions, energy consumption can be saved by 20% to 30%. Calculated based on a data center with 10,000 cabinets, 200 million to 300 million kWh of electricity can be saved a year.

When it comes to power consumption, Ulanqab also has abundant power supply.

In the operating cost of data centers, electricity usually accounts for 60% to 70%, and the proportion is higher for AI data centers due to dense GPUs. Therefore, whether a data center can be built depends on whether the place has stable and cheap electricity; and whether there is cheap electricity depends on what kind of energy system the place has.

Ulanqab not only has industrial electricity prices at the lowest tier in China, with the user-side electricity price less than half of that in the eastern coastal areas, but also has a high proportion of new energy supply featuring direct green power supply.

Wang Zhaoyang, General Manager of Alibaba Data Center, said that placing an extra-large data center with a total power capacity of 1GW in Ulanqab can save 5 billion yuan in electricity bills every year compared to placing it in other cities.

In addition to these advantages, Ulanqab has another advantage: proximity.

The straight-line distance from Ulanqab to Beijing is about 240 kilometers. If there is any problem, the tech giants can send people back and forth to solve it within the same day.

With these three advantages, Ulanqab is fully worthy of the title of "naturally chosen land".

But just like people, to become the top or even the best in the industry, a city cannot rely only on "natural endowments".

Although when signing the agreement with Huawei in 2013, the local government knew very little about big data, after realizing its huge potential, Ulanqab gave full play to its traditional advantage: to get rich, build roads first. In 2016 and 2018, the city invested its own money to build two 144-core optical cables directly connected to Beijing.

At that time, there were few enterprises in the park, and no return on the investment could be seen in the short term. But Liu Huansuo, deputy director of the Municipal Big Data Administration, explained: "We do this not to make much money, but to provide good services for the data centers."

Later, in order to give full play to the agglomeration effect brought by big data centers, the Ulanqab government also established the Big Data Administration and built an entrepreneurial base. In terms of services, it has implemented the "project steward" and "leadership contact" systems to provide "one-on-one whole-process intimate services", and introduced a series of supporting policies.

For example, according to reports, after entering Ulanqab for only one year, China United