URUMQI — A new kind of hub is emerging in the landscape of energy-rich Northwest China. Instead of oil derricks, these centers are filled with rows of server racks.
Inside a 200-square-meter room at the Tianshan Smart Valley Advanced Computing Cluster in Hami, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, hundreds of servers hum day and night. In just over a year, the likes of telecom giants, cloud computing service providers and tech firms have moved into the city.
"Since March, we have had companies visiting almost every day for talks," said Paruq Yehya, head of a local digital development bureau."Three clients are vying for one server company's computing power."
Artificial intelligence's soaring power demand has made Xinjiang and neighboring provinces such as Gansu attractive destinations for AI firms.
With abundant solar and wind reserves, Xinjiang offers green power at roughly one-third the price of coastal industrial electricity. Operating costs for a computing company in Hami are more than 40 percent lower than in the eastern regions of China. In Qingyang, Gansu, one of the northwestern region's flagship computing hubs, a branch of telecom giant China Mobile has revealed that monthly savings can reach 4 million yuan ($585,000).
