- China converts culture lands into data centers to compete with the American domain of AI
- The $ 37 billion project of Wuhu highlights Beijing's urgency in artificial intelligence
- Export restrictions leave China depending largely on less powerful local chips
China's ambitions in artificial intelligence have gained new visibility through their plan to develop a domestic alternative to the massive Stargate project that is being carried out in the United States by Operai and Oracle.
While the US initiative is expected to support up to two million AI chips, Beijing advances its own version anchored by a $ 37 billion project in Wuhu.
Although much smaller than the price of $ 500 billion linked to Stargate, the Chinese project is designed to consolidate the existing computer capacity in a more centralized network.
The Wuhu project and its scale
The site selected for this project is located in Wuhu, east of China, and covers old rice fields along an island of 760 acres in the Yangtze river basin.
This land, once dedicated to food production, is becoming a “data island” for four of the largest technological operators in the country: Huawei, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.
When placing the new “Mega-Cluster” of data centers near the main cities such as Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing, planners hope to provide faster inference services to dense urban populations.
From 2022, China encouraged the construction of server farm in the interior provinces with cheap foods.
However, these sites were often inactive, since local governments reassigned the capacity of the areas where demand was greater.
The new plan tries to solve that by linking urban and remote data centers through UB-Malla de Huawei technology.
This technology can provide redundancy while allowing unused computing power to be sold.
The Wuhu project subsidies, which supposedly cover up to 30% of AI chips acquisition costs, further reflect Beijing's urgency to make the new groups work.
Currently, China has about 15% of the global power calculation, much less than the estimated 75% of the United States.
Export restrictions have blocked access to advanced GPUs from NVIDIA, leaving national suppliers unable to completely match foreign performance.
That gap has created incentives for smuggling hardware, although officials seem intention to develop self -sufficient batteries to reduce dependence on sources abroad.
The long -term objective is that this infrastructure will allow companies and individuals to display the most sophisticated AI tools.
If local chips can support this ambition, it is still uncertain compared to the western options that feed the main data centers abroad.
The conversion of culture lands into the server space poses questions about sustainability, allocation of resources and energy demand.
Supporters consider that projects are vital to reduce technological division, while skeptics point out the costs of diverting agricultural land and the uncertainty of trusting less powerful local chips.
Via Hardware Toms
