HOHHOT, CHINA – The fourth annual Green Computing Power (Artificial Intelligence) Conference, held on August 22, 2026, on the Cilechuan Grassland in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, highlighted the region's emergence as a pivotal player in China's computing power industry. The conference, 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 showcased pilot initiatives 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 focus on Hohhot is no accident. The region offers a unique combination of natural advantages and strategic positioning. With an average annual temperature of just 7°C and over 200 days suitable for outdoor air cooling, data centers here save more than 20% on cooling costs. Electricity prices are around 0.36 yuan per kilowatt-hour, enabling a large-scale GPU cluster to save approximately 50 million yuan annually. Currently, Hohhot's total computing capacity reaches 150,000 P, with over 80% powered by green energy.
However, the intermittent nature of wind and solar power poses a challenge for continuous computing operations. 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 power station, featuring 300,000 kilowatts of wind, 60,000 kilowatts of photovoltaic, and four-hour energy storage. A collaborative control platform dynamically adjusts power allocation based on real-time data, prioritizing green energy usage when available and supplementing with grid power and stored energy when needed. This bidirectional interaction between generation and consumption optimizes resource use.
On the consumption side, efficiency measures are also in place. 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, saving 560,000 kilowatt-hours annually in its B02 machine hall. When fully operational, two machine halls are projected to save 10 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and 150,000 tons of water each year.
The cluster 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, Hohhot aims to establish 10 token factories capable of producing 20 trillion tokens daily by 2028. This shift will allow customers to procure not just infrastructure but customized intelligent services.
The strategic importance of Hohhot's green computing initiative extends beyond local economic benefits. It is a key component of China's "East Data West Computing" project, which redirects high-demand computing tasks from eastern regions to resource-rich western areas. By converting abundant prairie winds into stable computing power, Hohhot is demonstrating a scalable model for sustainable AI infrastructure. As the demand for AI training and inference grows, the integration of renewable energy with computing will be critical in reducing the carbon footprint of the digital economy.
