China appears to be working to build and consolidation its own AI data centers to counter the United States' "Stargate" AI data center construction project.
According to the Financial Times of the United Kingdom on the 21st (local time), China is building a large-scale data center in Wuhu, an agricultural city in Anhui province. On a 3-square-kilometer island being developed as a "data island," four AI data centers to be operated by Huawei, China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile are slated to be newly established.
This comes as a measure by Chinese authorities to offset U.S. controls on exports of AI chips to China, with the United States accounting for about three-quarters of global computing power. China's new data centers are being built near densely populated areas, and these facilities are expected to focus on AI inference and related tasks.
So far, 15 corporations have built data centers in Wuhu, Anhui province, which is close to Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. The total investment is 270 billion yuan (about 52 trillion won). A company official said the Wuhu government covers up to 30% of the AI chip procurement expense, describing it as favorable terms compared with other regions.
A supplier involved in the project said it was to build a "Chinese version of Stargate." OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle formed the AI joint venture Stargate and previously agreed to invest more than $500 billion over the next four years to build U.S. AI infrastructure.