DeepSeek2026-09-04 11:07:18DeepSeek Plans 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT Chips for Inner Mongolia AI ClusterDeepSeek is planning to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips at its AI data center under construction in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, according to Bloomberg citing sources. This would create one of the largest known clusters of Huawei AI chips. However, Huawei's production capacity constraints could delay full delivery by over a year. The chips will run DeepSeek models but are not intended for training, which will continue to rely on Nvidia GPUs. The 160,000 chips represent only part of the broader project, which includes a 1GW AI data center and additional rented computing power.860
Inner Mongoli2026-08-23 13:54:45Ulanqab’s planned 12.5GW AI data center buildout tops OpenAI’s Stargate on announced capacityInner Mongolia’s Ulanqab is emerging as one of China’s key AI data center hubs, according to a WIRED report cited by ABMedia. Goldman Sachs research cited in the report says nearly 100 data centers have either opened or entered construction there since 2016, with Chinese companies committing projects totaling an estimated 12.5 gigawatts of capacity. More than 70% of that planned buildout was announced in the past year. That announced capacity exceeds OpenAI’s Stargate on a like-for-like basis. OpenAI has outlined Stargate as a long-term project with total planned investment of $500 billion and about 10GW of capacity once fully built. On that comparison, Ulanqab’s 12.5GW is roughly one-quarter higher. The report says DeepSeek, ByteDance, Alibaba and Xiaohongshu are all putting data center infrastructure into the region. It attributes Ulanqab’s rise to three factors: lower power costs, naturally cold weather that can cut cooling demand, and proximity to Beijing. After two dedicated fiber links were built in 2017 and 2019, average network latency reportedly fell below 5 milliseconds, making the city suitable not only for AI training workloads but also for inference tasks that need real-time data exchange.1440
Ulanqab2026-08-11 10:58:07Ulanqab emerges as an AI compute battleground as DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud expand data center betsUlanqab in Inner Mongolia is becoming one of China’s key hubs for AI infrastructure as cloud providers and model companies move from renting compute to controlling it more directly. In a field visit reported by Phoenix Tech, Alibaba Cloud showcased its modular 5.0 containerized data center design in the city, saying the facility now carries 80% of its intelligent computing workloads. The company’s data center chief Wang Chaoyang said no GPU cards are sitting idle and argued that delivery speed has become a direct measure of customer value. The report places DeepSeek at the center of the shift. The company has started large-scale hiring in Ulanqab and plans to build a super-large intelligent computing center there with total power of 1 gigawatt. Local government data cited in the article says Ulanqab had signed 84 data center projects by the end of 2025, including 81 intelligent computing centers, with total investment above 500 billion yuan. Cheap electricity, a 90% green power mix, 4 millisecond network latency, cool weather and proximity to Beijing are turning the city into a preferred site for large-scale training clusters. The report also argues that the next bottleneck is no longer only chips, but power delivery, water usage and the ability to industrialize data center construction through standardized modular systems.2340
