North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region is making significant strides in building a national green computing hub by utilizing its top-ranked renewable energy capacity and strategic role in China’s “Eastern Data, Western Computing” project.

As the only region designated both as a national pilot zone for big data infrastructure and a hub node in the integrated national computing network, Inner Mongolia is advancing a synergistic model of “green power + computing + industry" to promote high-quality development.

With a total computing power capacity of 126,000 petaflops –116,000 of which are dedicated to artificial intelligence computing – Inner Mongolia ranks first in the country. Its data centers boast a green electricity usage rate of 84.57 percent, setting a national benchmark in sustainable digital infrastructure.

In 2023, the State Council released an opinion to support the accelerated development of Inner Mongolia's computing network hub, particularly the Horinger Data Center Cluster. This initiative aims to increase the "green content" of the national data initiative by fully tapping into Inner Mongolia's clean energy potential.

At the Jingmeng AI Computing Center in Horinger New District, rows of server cabinets glow under natural cooling for half the year, thanks to an average annual temperature of 7°C. Together with Ulaanqab’s Jining Big Data Industrial Park, these facilities form the backbone of the region's data infrastructure, benefiting from Inner Mongolia's unique position across northern China.

The region is pushing for a full-scale green transformation of its data center operations. In the first quarter of 2025, power consumption of data centers within the cluster reached 1.22 billion kWh, with 84.57 percent supplied by renewables, significantly reducing operational costs.

This is powered by Inner Mongolia's unmatched green energy capacity. In 2024, installed wind and solar power exceeded 135 GW – surpassing coal power – and led the nation in total, new, and generated capacity. But green computing here is more than just clean electricity; it's about building a full low-carbon industrial chain.

In Horinger, Baichuan Digital Technology Co manufactures ultra-fusion liquid-cooled servers that cut energy use from the source. At UCloud's AI center in Ulaanqab, excess heat from server rooms is recycled for heating, recovering up to 78,000 GJ annually and reducing carbon emissions by around 7,380 metric tons.

To ensure continued growth, Inner Mongolia has rolled out dedicated policies, optimized industrial planning, and enhanced energy coordination. It is also phasing out energy-inefficient data centers and strictly regulating the energy consumption of new projects.

The region has built a national internet backbone interconnection point and an international data channel. With Horinger as the center, data transmission to nearby urban clusters like Hohhot, Baotou, and Ordos takes under 2 milliseconds, and just 4.53 ms to Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, forming a digital "information highway" for computing power.

Upstream, Inner Mongolia is building infrastructure around its renewable power sources and has attracted 18 tech manufacturing projects covering servers, semiconductors, communication devices, sensors, and electronics.

Horinger is now home to five major digital bases: for data processing, operations and maintenance, AI model training and inference, trusted computing applications, and innovation compatibility. Twenty companies are already using computing power for smart mining, ecological monitoring, and more, turning "China Cloud Valley" into a national testbed for digital innovation.

In parallel, Inner Mongolia is strengthening data governance. A classification-based protection system and rigorous privacy and security protocols are in place to ensure safe, high-quality data development.

The region also launched a multi-cloud computing resource monitoring and dispatch platform in the Horinger cluster, now interconnected with similar platforms in Beijing, Anhui, Guizhou, and Chongqing—laying the foundation for efficient national computing power trading.