A new skyline of data centres is rising from the rolling plains of rural China

In Inner Mongolia, potato fields are sharing space with a very different crop of the future: huge data centres meant to power China’s AI push. The scene in Ulanqab is all cranes, welding sparks and workers in yellow helmets, while farmers keep harvesting beside them. It’s an odd pairing, and a revealing one.

The local pitch is simple: build the computing muscle first, then use it to push AI across the economy. Beijing wants AI embedded in 90% of industries and society by 2030, and it sees these facilities as part of national security as much as industrial policy. The country is putting up hundreds of centres for firms including Huawei, ByteDance and DeepSeek across places such as Ulanqab, Ningxia, Gansu and Guizhou.

The strategy is also about talent. Jack Zhang of the University of Science and Technology of China says fewer students and researchers are heading to the US, and more are coming back. He studied at Yale and Cambridge before being recruited into a high-level programme in China. Another engineer in Shanghai, Dang Ronghao, says campuses are becoming more open and that researchers are linking AI with everything from nuclear fusion to new drugs.

But the build-out has a shadow. Some of the provinces being used for these centres already have wind and solar power, cooler weather and cheaper land, yet parts of the grid still run on coal. Water is tight in dry Inner Mongolia. Villages have been relocated, though the details are murky, and locals are wary of speaking openly about it. One anonymous resident asked what the big-data boom has actually done for ordinary people. Another farmer, checking his sheep with a smashed phone and a pocket dongle, said AI has nothing to do with him.

That tension runs through the whole story. Beijing sees AI as a way to offset an ageing workforce and keep pace with the US. Plenty of people on the ground seem much less convinced that the future arrives evenly.