SemiAnalysis Visits Chahar: 22 AI Campuses, <$3M/MW Capex

SemiAnalysis reporters found 22 AI datacenter projects underway across Inner Mongolia's Chahar High-tech Zone, with nearly 30,000 construction workers on site according to a local report cited in a newsletter dispatch co-written by Everlyn Tan, Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, Xiaopeng Laoban and Dylan Patel.

The anchor of their September 2026 tour is Envision Group's Galaxy campus at Ulanqab, designed for 800MW of IT capacity. The first 120MW phase was delivered in roughly a year, with full campus completion expected by the end of 2027. SemiAnalysis pegs construction cost at less than $3 million per MW, which the authors describe as a fifth of US costs for a comparable site. For scale, Crusoe's Stargate Abilene campus has 820MW of critical IT capacity on 1.2GW of power.

Envision is doing more than operating the hall. "Beyond running the datacenter, Envision builds its own wind farms and a dedicated power line to supply it," the authors write. Wind sites roughly 80km apart carry 420MW of installed capacity and supply over 60% of the first two phases' power, backed by a 4-hour battery storage system. In a 5MW pilot hall, the campus runs 800V DC all the way to the rack: solid-state transformers "take 10kV AC from the grid and convert it straight to 800V DC," per the piece.

The underlying economics are flattering. Power in Inner Mongolia runs roughly $0.055/kWh. Rents sit near $40/kW/month excluding power, a figure the authors say has roughly halved over the past five years as regional capex fell about 25%. SemiAnalysis calls the province the "West Texas of China": it holds around 57% of the country's usable wind resources, Ulanqab capacity factors sit at 35 to 40%, and the region has 25GW of datacenter projects already announced.

The dispatch lands in a run of Chinese datacenter coverage we have been tracking. About 25% of Chinese datacenters built in the past decade already run on DC, the authors note, versus about 97% of US sites still on AC UPS.