Hohhot pairs 186bn yuan of green compute with a till for selling tokens abroad

The interesting item is not the yuan total. It is the service list bolted to the new free trade zone platform: compliance assessment, computing-power scheduling, token measurement, cross-border settlement and developer support ^[4]. Only one of those five produces compute. The others are the apparatus of selling it, and two of them do the work that matters to anyone outside China: a meter that counts tokens, and a payment path that clears across a border.

Price is the pitch. Electricity in Hohhot runs at about 0.36 yuan per kilowatt hour, and more than 200 days a year are cool enough for direct outdoor air cooling, which the city says trims cooling costs by over a fifth ^{[8] [9]}. The same material claims a large GPU cluster saves roughly 50 million yuan a year at that tariff ^[25], and it supplies its own denominator: China Mobile's Hohhot Intelligent Computing Center spent about 290 million yuan on power in 2025, more than 70% of its operating expenses ^[11]. Divide the bill by the tariff and that site drew on the order of 806 million kilowatt hours ^[18]. Run the 70% backwards and its total operating expenses were at most about 414 million yuan ^[19]. The advertised saving works out at roughly a sixth of the power line ^[20].

Those cost figures come from a promotional release issued by the Hohhot City Integrated Media Center ^[10]. The seller wrote the price list, nobody outside has audited it, and an export platform quoting token rates will be quoting off it.

Envision's Galaxy Campus at Ulanqab, brought online earlier this month, is designed for up to a million AI accelerators with planned power above two gigawatts ^{[12] [13]}. Two gigawatts held for a year at 0.36 yuan is about 6.3 billion yuan of electricity ^[21]. The same pair of numbers implies roughly two kilowatts per accelerator once cooling and networking are counted ^[22], which is tight rather than impossible, and it means the campus only makes sense at high utilisation.

Where that utilisation is supposed to come from is answered by the older policy. Under Eastern Data Western Computing, dating from 2021, infrastructure serving the eastern seaboard is built in the rural west ^[14], and data centres must draw 80% of their power from renewables by the end of this decade ^[15]. Simeng Deng of Rystad Energy told AFP that the western build-out suits operators facing that commitment, and that server farms "can be an engine to digest or absorb the surplus of renewable power generation" ^{[16] [17]}. Compute sited to absorb curtailed wind has to find load when the surplus appears, which is not the same clock as Chinese business hours.

Domestic appetite has multiplied roughly 1,400 times in about two years on the official count ^[23]. Inner Mongolia is building the offshore sales desk anyway, with the settlement plumbing pointed outward.