Tommy Wilko

By now, it's amply clear that the big bosses of US frontier AI labs are really, really scared of China. And, fascinatingly, part of the answer why might be a tiny place in Inner Mongolia that you've probably never heard of: Ulanqab prefecture. Heard of it? Didn't think so. Even myself, who's traveled to Inner Mongolia twice, had never heard of it before researching this story. This is because, at first glance, this place is pretty unremarkable. Check its Wikipedia page (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulanqa…) and you’ll see the only thing it’s famous for is being the birthplace of He Pingping, who briefly held the Guinness record for world’s shortest man. That’s it, that’s the list! Otherwise, it's just a sparsely populated - 1.5 million people, minuscule by Chinese standards - stretch of windswept grassland on the Mongolian plateau. Except there is one number that tells you there is more to this place that meets the eye: this tiny prefecture consumes nearly 1% of all of China's electricity - and that number is growing by double digit numbers every year. And yes, I did write **consume**, not produce. In fact, when you divide Ulanqab's electricity consumption by the number of households living there, each household in this remote corner of Inner Mongolia "consumes" about 105,000 kWh in electricity, roughly 10 times the U.S. average. Insane electricity consumption numbers. So what are the Ulanqabese doing? Are they all running 10 American households' worth of appliances? Here is another number that might clue you in on the answer: over the past few years, this unremarkable prefecture has quietly signed over half a trillion yuan (and, yes, that’s trillion, with a "T") worth of investment deals from all the major Chinese tech giants. What is going on, you'll have guessed by now, is the most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth - and it's really surprising this hasn't been talked about more because the scale is beyond anything else, and by an immense margin. Take Elon Musk's so-called "Colossus" datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee which he pitches as "the world’s largest AI supercomputer." According to their own numbers (x.ai/colossus), Colossus has 200,000 chips, which, let's be clear, is already super impressive. In datacenter lingo, this converts to roughly 5000-6000 "racks": you know, the fridge-sized cabinets full of blinking lights you see in every movie scene set in a server room. How many racks are they building in Ulanqab? Over 5 million. Yes, about one thousand times the scale of "Colossus" 🤯 I tripled-checked the number: it is indeed the official number published by authoritative sources such as "Science and Technology Daily", the official newspaper of China's Ministry of Science and Technology (stdaily.com/web/gdxw/2026-08…). This is an absurdly large amount of compute. What we see appearing in this Inner Mongolian steppe may be the closest thing to a world brain humanity has ever built - a place where a large share of the world's thinking will physically happen. And - as we'll see - what makes this story so fascinating is not just the scale, but why it's getting built in this particular patch of Inner Mongolian grassland which combines a number of characteristics unlike anywhere else. If you believe, as I do - and as both China and the US obviously do as well - that AI will be the defining technology of the 21st century, this makes Ulanqab one of the single most relevant geopolitical places in the world right now. The full story - the Chinese government plan Ulanqab is part of, energy prices, chips and the strategic questions this raises - is here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/…