CBS: 30,000 Workers Build AI Data Center Complex in Inner Mongolia

From Ulanqab, in Inner Mongolia, CBS News reports that 30,000 workers brought in from across China are building what the network calls the biggest, fastest-growing infrastructure project anywhere in China right now — a data center complex hosting capacity for Huawei, Alibaba, ByteDance, DeepSeek, Baidu, Z.ai, ZData and VNET.

The economics are harsh for US competitors. The report puts Chinese data center construction at about one-fifth the cost of US equivalents, and says China has more than double the US's power generation capacity. Cold-climate siting cuts cooling bills; wind and solar supplement fossil power.

"There is no opposition to data centers in China. It's never heard of, whereas in the U.S., it has become a huge movement against data center building in neighborhoods," Henry Wang, founder and president of the Center For China and Globalization, told CBS. A UN survey cited in the piece puts Chinese public support for data center construction at 80%, with at least two-thirds of citizens using AI in daily life.

Baletu, a 72-year-old local farmer, told the network: "It doesn't affect my farmland, not at all. It's good for the area."

The report notes Chinese AI models are believed to be about six months behind US competitors. Wang's framing is that the race has moved on from silicon: "power is the bottleneck, and whoever goes through that first gets the advantage." China's buildout has been a near-daily presence in our AI Infrastructure feed, with 481 tracked alerts over the past 90 days.