On the Grasslands of Inner Mongolia, China’s AI Future Is Rising
In the wide grasslands of Inner Mongolia, farmers are picking plump potatoes alongside an unfamiliar crop: rows of hulking, rectangular buildings that will help power China’s artificial intelligence platforms.
In a rare visit to the region, the BBC found that Ulanqab, a place of steppes and volcanoes, is an unlikely digital frontier. For years, it has been known as China’s potato capital. Now its fields are also construction sites for a wave of data centers, as President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping meet to discuss AI safety, among other issues.
At one site, hundreds of workers in yellow helmets haul heavy equipment as welding sparks fly from metal scaffolding. Cranes swing roof sections into place while men balance on ladders to plaster brickwork. “This is China speed,” one worker jokes, describing his country as an “infrastructure maniac” before walking away. An electrical engineer says the project is already in its second phase. “There will be many more phases afterwards.”
AI sits at the heart of China’s contest with the United States, and the key to that contest is computing power—much of it housed in data centers like these. To the Chinese Communist Party, these buildings are critical to both economic growth and national security. Once finished, they are meant to help embed AI across 90% of industries and society by 2030.
China is not only building infrastructure. It is also cultivating talent: young engineers and researchers who increasingly see their country as a place of opportunity. Part of the shift is driven by rising tensions with Washington and Trump-era immigration restrictions that have made the American dream less attainable for some.
“Fewer students and researchers are heading to the US, and more are returning from the US to China. That is very clear,” says Jack Zhang of the University of Science and Technology of China. Zhang was recruited through a high-level program after studying at Yale in the U.S. and Cambridge in the U.K. “I wanted to take some of the AI work I was doing in the lab and apply it to human health and medicine,” he says. “That requires more resources, more people and sometimes more government support, which can be difficult to access overseas.”
China’s expanding AI capabilities are one reason the U.S. says it does not want to pause its own AI development, despite stark warnings from inside the industry that the technology is moving too fast. “Whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump said last week. Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI firm Anthropic, has called for keeping the U.S.-led ban on selling advanced chips and equipment to China, warning that a Chinese lead would pose a grave danger for the U.S. and the world.
That is unlikely to be what Xi wants to hear when he arrives in Washington on Wednesday. The state-run Global Times, which echoes Beijing’s positions, dismissed U.S. fears as part of a “Cold War playbook” to contain China’s rise.
But China is not simply trying to catch up. It is also promoting an alternative model. Xi has encouraged Chinese AI firms to develop more affordable, open-source models that people, companies and countries can modify as they wish. That approach contrasts with the closed-model strategies of U.S. developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, whose design elements are kept secret.
Beijing favors its approach in part because it has worked well. By sharing technology, Chinese AI firms have been able to innovate quickly—helping China work around one of its biggest constraints: limited access to the advanced chips needed to unlock greater computing power. At the same time, Beijing wants a bigger say in writing the rules that govern AI. Xi has repeatedly called for more regulation and a global framework for others to follow.
With calls for AI safety growing, this week’s summit at the White House is especially significant. Can the two sides collaborate on regulating AI? Is any talk of a slowdown even realistic? In places like Ulanqab, it certainly does not look that way.
China is building hundreds of data centers—for companies including Huawei, ByteDance and DeepSeek—in sparsely populated provinces such as Ulanqab, Ningxia and Gansu in the north, and Guizhou in the southwest. These regions already have vast renewable energy capacity from wind and solar. Land is cheaper, the weather is cooler, and there is less demand for water.
Still, the buildout comes with concerns. China wants most of its data centers to be fueled by green energy by 2030, but part of its grid is still fed by coal. Water supply remains a worry in the arid, dry parts of Inner Mongolia. Entire villages have been relocated, though it is hard to confirm how many people were moved or what compensation they received. It is a topic few will discuss openly because voicing concerns can be dangerous.
“This big data has absolutely nothing to do with ordinary people,” one local says anonymously, off camera. “What benefits has it brought us?” He says few locals have found jobs there. Others describe fears that their land will be taken and they will no longer be able to farm for a living.
There are optimists, too. A man who gives his surname as Zhang, standing alongside potato pickers near the data centers, says China is now at the forefront of the world. His children have found jobs there, he says. “It’s not like the 1960s, when it was relatively backward,” he says. “China is doing alright now. Whether in economic development or other areas, it is doing well.”
Surveys appear to suggest there is little opposition to AI or its widespread adoption, compared with many other countries. But such figures are hard to evaluate in a heavily censored climate. Beijing has been clear that it sees AI as a solution to an aging workforce and is rapidly automating manufacturing and production. That is producing anxiety over job losses, which is also difficult to measure.
This is also a country producing around five million science and technology graduates each year, compared with about half a million in the U.S. As more of them stay in China, they see a growing ecosystem for innovation.
AI developer Dang Ronghao, 27, who works for a leading tech company, says Chinese campuses are becoming more open, allowing him to talk with researchers around the world from his base in Shanghai. “I’ve seen research combining AI with nuclear fusion, AI with astrophysics, AI with new materials, and AI with the development of new drugs,” he says. “I think we are entering a good era.”
Even so, some argue that China still rewards conformity over challenge. “It’s not as open as I wish,” says Professor Liu Jun of the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Tsinghua University, who has taught at Harvard and Stanford. “I keep encouraging students here to ask more questions, to challenge more, but that’s hard to change. I think partly it’s culture, partly it’s the system.”
Far from the labs where researchers are pushing the AI frontier, many Chinese people are still grappling with more immediate economic troubles: a sluggish economy, rising youth unemployment, low spending and property prices that have plummeted. In rural areas, an aging population is a growing concern.
“Big data and all that… pretty good—but it has nothing to do with me,” says one farmer in Inner Mongolia, riding a cart to check on his sheep. He says he has no use for AI and hardly uses the internet. The screen on his phone is smashed, and his Wi-Fi comes from a pocket dongle for which he pays just over 40 yuan a month.
“There haven’t really been any changes for me. I don’t know about the future,” he says. That kind of skepticism can become a challenge for Beijing. So much is changing here and elsewhere in the country, but it is hard to know how many people are as invested as their leaders in this tech-charged future.
China has criticized the idea that it is engaged in “malicious competition” over AI. And while China may be winning one AI race and the U.S. another, either side could still pull ahead. In Ulanqab, the answer to that contest is being poured in concrete, steel and silicon.