On August 22, 2026, the fourth annual Green Computing Power (Artificial Intelligence) Conference convened on the Cilechuan Grassland in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, drawing national attention to the city's role in China's computing power industry. The event, themed "Building Synergy between Computing and Electricity, Exploring New Horizons in Token Economy, and Creating the Future of Artificial Intelligence Together," unveiled the Green Computing Power Development Research Report (2026) and highlighted pilot projects like "millisecond-level urban computing." Major companies, including ByteDance and Cambricon, signed agreements worth tens of billions of yuan to develop green intelligent computing centers and token factories.
The conference's location is no coincidence. Hohhot offers a unique combination of natural and strategic advantages for data centers. With an average annual temperature of just 7°C and over 200 days suitable for outdoor air cooling, the city reduces cooling costs by more than 20%. Electricity prices around 0.36 yuan per kilowatt-hour allow a large-scale GPU cluster to save approximately 50 million yuan annually on power. Currently, Hohhot's total computing capacity reaches 150,000 P, with over 80% powered by green electricity.
However, the intermittent nature of wind and solar power poses a challenge to the 24/7 reliability required for AI workloads. 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 four-hour energy storage. A collaborative control platform collects data at millisecond intervals to dynamically allocate power, prioritizing flexible tasks when green energy is abundant and deferring them during shortages, with the public grid as backup. This bidirectional interaction between power generation and consumption marks a shift from the traditional unidirectional model.
On the consumption side, efficiency improvements are underway. The Hohhot data center operated by China Mobile recovers waste heat from nearby power plants for cooling, improving its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) from 1.315 to 1.209 and saving 560,000 kilowatt-hours annually. Once two machine halls are fully operational, annual savings are projected to reach 10 million kilowatt-hours and 150,000 tons of water.
The city has attracted 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, offering customers not just cabinets and bandwidth but also customized intelligent services.
The prairie winds continue to blow, and Hohhot is converting every kilowatt-hour of green electricity into stable, reliable computing power, positioning itself as a cornerstone of China's AI infrastructure.
