On August 22, 2026, the fourth annual Green Computing Power (Artificial Intelligence) Conference convened on the Cilechuan Grassland in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, drawing attention to the region's role in China's computing power landscape. 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 initiatives such as "millisecond-level urban computing." Major companies, including ByteDance and Cambricon, signed agreements worth tens of billions, focusing on green intelligent computing centers and token factories.
The conference's location is no coincidence. Hohhot offers a unique combination of factors that make it an ideal hub for data centers. With an average annual temperature of 7°C and over 200 days suitable for outdoor air cooling, the city reduces cooling costs by more than 20%. Electricity prices average around 0.36 yuan per kilowatt-hour, enabling a large-scale GPU cluster to save approximately 50 million yuan annually on power expenses. Currently, Hohhot's total computing capacity reaches 150,000 P, with over 80% of its electricity coming from green sources.
However, the intermittency of wind and solar power poses a challenge for 24/7 computing loads. To address this, the city 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 collects millisecond-level data on wind output, solar irradiance, storage status, and computing load to dynamically allocate power: when green energy is abundant, storage charges and delay-tolerant tasks are prioritized; when it is scarce, storage discharges and the grid supplements, while flexible tasks are deferred. This bidirectional interaction transforms the traditional unidirectional supply model.
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. This has resulted in annual electricity savings of 560,000 kilowatt-hours since operations began, with projections of 10 million kilowatt-hours and 150,000 tons of water saved annually once two machine halls are fully operational.
The city now hosts 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, offering customers not just cabinets and bandwidth but also customized intelligent services.
The prairie winds continue to blow, and Hohhot is committed to converting every kilowatt-hour of green electricity into stable, reliable computing power, setting a benchmark for sustainable AI infrastructure in China.
