In the expansive grasslands of Inner Mongolia, farmers are picking plump potatoes alongside new neighbours: huge, rectangular blocks that will fuel China's AI platforms. Ulanqab, with its steppes and volcanoes, is an unlikely digital frontier. For years, it has been China's official 'potato capital'. But now its fields have become construction sites for a slew of data centres, as Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping meet to discuss AI safety among other things.
Hundreds of workers in yellow helmets carry heavy equipment into the building site as welding sparks fly off metal scaffolding. Above them huge cranes move with precision to build rooftops, while men balance on ladders to plaster brickwork. 'This is China speed,' jokes one worker. 'An infrastructure maniac,' is how he describes his country, laughing as he walks away. ‘There is one phase every year. This is the second phase,' explains an electrical engineer. 'There will be many more phases afterwards.'
Artificial intelligence sits at the heart of China's contest with the United States and the key to it is the computing power inside the data centres here. To the Chinese Communist Party, these buildings are critical for the country's economic and national security. Once finished, they will help drive its mission to embed AI across 90% of industries and society by 2030.
China's not just building the infrastructure. It's also creating a pool of talent: young engineers and researchers who now see their country as a place of opportunity, partly because tensions with the US and Trump's restrictions on immigration have soured the American dream. 'Fewer students and researchers are heading to the US, and more are returning from the US to China. That is very clear,' says Jack Zhang from the University of Science and Technology of China.
China's expanding AI capabilities are one reason why the US says it doesn't want to hit pause on its AI development, despite stark warnings from inside the industry that the technology was moving too fast. 'Whoever wins AI, wins,' President Trump said last week. The CEO of AI firm Anthropic, Dario Amodei, called for keeping the US-led ban on selling advanced chips and equipment to China, while warning that a Chinese lead would 'pose grave danger for the US and the world.'
