Atlas of AI Buildout

Scale · Power & Grid

China built a second internet and told nobody

China's data centre capacity and national computing hubs

31.9 GWinstalled Chinese capacity, 2024 · grade A, Reported

China holds 31.9 GW of installed data-centre capacity — 26% of the world's total and second only to the United States — across roughly 11 million racks, up from 3.15 million in 2019. Rystad expects it past 60 GW by 2030.

It is organised unlike anywhere else. Rather than commercial metros, the build follows eight designated national computing hubs under the "Eastern Data, Western Computing" programme: compute is deliberately pushed inland to Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, where land is cheap and wind and hydro are stranded, while demand stays on the coast. The map here shows those hubs, which are about 10 GW — the policy-directed core, not the whole market.

What makes it hard to see is that no Chinese source publishes what CBRE publishes for Northern Virginia: no metro inventory, no vacancy, no absorption. The IEA's national total is solid. Everything below it is reconstruction. This is the largest known unknown in the buildout, and no subscription fixes it — every commercial vendor is triangulating the same fragments.

Source — IEA, Energy and AI Observatory — installed data-centre capacity (2026)
Installed data-centre power capacity by country and region, 122.2 GW globally (2024). United States 53.7 GW (44% of world), China 31.9 GW, European Union 11.9 GW, Japan and Korea 6.6 GW, India 3.6 GW, other Asia-Pacific 3.1 GW, United Kingdom 2.6 GW, Australia and New Zealand 1.6 GW, Africa 1.5 GW, other North America 1.5 GW, other Central and South America 1.4 GW, Eurasia 1.2 GW, Middle East 1.1 GW, Brazil 0.6 GW. The best-grounded national capacity series in public existence; country splits inside a regional bucket are derived here and graded B.

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The thinking behind the atlas is written up in Cheap thought has a physical address on Substack.

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