China has brought online its first AI data center powered entirely through a direct connection to renewable electricity, demonstrating the country’s strategy of pairing expanding AI infrastructure with clean energy generation.
Located in Zhongwei in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the new facility runs on electricity supplied from renewable energy sources rather than conventional grid power. The project combines direct renewable energy delivery with advanced liquid-cooling technology to lower energy consumption even while supporting high-performance AI computing workloads.
The data center is the first in China designed to a wind-powered liquid-cooling standard, according to state media reports. China Telecom Ningxia Branch, which operates the facility, claimed the design enables both improved operational efficiency and lower environmental impact.
A key performance metric is the site’s Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.15. PUE measures how efficiently a data center uses electricity, with lower values indicating that more power is used for computing rather than supporting infrastructure like cooling. Conventional facilities typically operate at higher PUE levels, making the new site’s efficiency impressive for compute-intensive AI applications.
Liquid cooling plays a key role in achieving the facility’s efficiency. Unlike traditional air cooling, liquid cooling removes heat more effectively from densely packed processors and AI accelerators while requiring less energy to maintain required temperatures. The approach has become important as AI systems need ever more computing density and consume far more power than legacy enterprise workloads.
Eastern Data, Western Computing
The project also advances China’s broader “Eastern Data, Western Computing” initiative, a national strategy that shifts data-intensive computing from heavily populated eastern regions to western provinces where renewable energy sources and available land are in greater supply. By moving AI processing closer to wind and solar generation sites, China reduces pressure on eastern power grids while improving the sustainability of its tech infrastructure.
Zhongwei has become one of the central locations supporting that strategy. Once known mostly as a desert city with few residents, it has become one of China’s largest computing hubs due to its substantial wind and solar resources.
The city now hosts 10 large data center parks containing approximately 3.31 million standard server racks, with six of China’s ten largest computing service providers maintaining operations there. Zhongwei has also established high-speed network connections with more than 20 major Chinese cities, including Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, allowing lower-latency data transmission between western computing resources and eastern economic centers.
Beyond supplying AI computing capacity, the new facility is expected to stimulate additional investment throughout China’s AI infrastructure ecosystem. Growing demand for AI processing is likely to boost deployment of servers, AI accelerators, liquid-cooling systems and other supporting technologies that run data centers.
