Data center news has come thick and fast in Ulanqab since the start of 2026. IDC Circle has exclusively tracked and compiled 33 key local data center projects, excluding those that went into operation before 2026. As of October 19, the tally stood at five signed or at letter-of-intent stage, 18 filed or in early-stage work, five under construction, and five delivered or in operation.

Heavy on Filings, Light on Construction: More Than Half Stuck Between Filing and Groundbreaking

By stage, Ulanqab's pipeline skews toward paperwork. Eighteen projects are filed or in early-stage work, 54.5% of the total, while projects under construction and projects delivered or operating number five each. Only five sit at the signed or intent stage, but their disclosed intended investment reaches 54 billion yuan, more than all filed projects combined. Those figures are mostly framework or planning numbers that may overlap with filed projects, so the two sets should not simply be added together.

Late August was a cluster window for filings: two Volcano Engine projects, Jinkai New Energy and Yuxi Dianfeng all cleared filing between August 25 and 27. On September 23, Chindata completed an amended filing for phase one, stage one of its Huiteng Volcano No. 5 campus. On June 16, three projects from Zhonglian Yunjing, Yungang and Yunshu were approved the same day.

43.882 Billion Yuan in Filed Investment, Top Three Account for Nearly Half

All 18 filed or early-stage projects disclosed investment figures, totaling 43.882 billion yuan. The top three are CICC Data's Ulanqab green AI computing industrial base at 11.167 billion yuan, Qishang Online's Ulanqab AI computing center at 6 billion yuan, and phase one of Chindata's Huiteng Volcano No. 5 campus at 3.755 billion yuan. Together they come to 20.922 billion yuan, or 47.7% of the total.

Among projects under construction, VNET's zero-carbon AI computing base phase two (3.65 billion yuan) and China Unicom's Ulanqab AI data center (1.774 billion yuan) have disclosed investment, totaling 5.424 billion yuan.

On the signed and intent side, GDS plans to invest more than 30 billion yuan over five years across several high-density and gigawatt-scale campuses, Qishang Online's AI computing cluster carries a planned investment of about 18 billion yuan, and Zhongjing Yunwang's AI data center was signed at 6 billion yuan. One distinction matters here: Qishang Online's 18 billion yuan cluster plan and its filed 6 billion yuan AI computing center are two separate projects and cannot be added together.

By company, VNET has the densest footprint, with six projects on the list, covering phases one, two and three of its zero-carbon AI computing base, phase three of its cloud AI computing base, and phases one and two of its compute-and-power convergence AI computing base. ByteDance and Volcano Engine's two filed projects total 6.129 billion yuan in investment and 112,802 planned racks, the largest rack count of any single company.

280,000 Filed Racks, With Mega-Campuses Pulling Away From Smaller Projects

Twelve filed or early-stage projects disclosed rack or cabinet counts, totaling roughly 280,300. Chindata accounts for 81,920 racks, Volcano Engine's Beijing-Inner Mongolia computing center 66,722, Jinkai New Energy 49,680 and Volcano Engine's high-tech zone computing center 46,080. Those four alone come to 244,400 racks, or 87.2% of the total, a clear tilt toward mega-campuses.

Dividing investment by rack count reveals two distinct project profiles. The four large campuses above work out to roughly 46,000 to 61,000 yuan per rack. Qishang Online's AI computing center comes in at about 300,000 yuan per rack, with a plan that includes 5,312 24kW cabinets and 1,280 54kW cabinets. Zhonglian's three projects land at about 280,000 to 300,000 yuan per rack, and VNET's compute-and-power convergence phases one and two at about 500,000 yuan per rack.

A caveat on the metric: projects do not uniformly disclose whether investment includes IT equipment, so this investment-per-rack figure is arithmetic on the table's data rather than a reflection of actual construction costs.

Leading Projects Enter the Delivery Phase

VNET zero-carbon AI computing base: the phase one AI building, about 28,900 square meters, was completed and delivered on June 25, fitted with 5kW air-cooled fluorine pump cabinets. Phase two, with total investment of 3.65 billion yuan, is designed to host around 220,000 servers and is expected to come online gradually in 2027. Phase three topped out structurally on October 4, with a total floor area of 176,248.99 square meters.

China Unicom Ulanqab AI data center: total investment of 1.774 billion yuan, with two computing halls and one 110kV substation planned and a total IT load of 83.2MW. Construction runs from April 2026 to April 2028. Earth excavation began on July 27, and phase one is slated to finish civil structural work in May 2027 and hand over for mechanical and electrical installation and commissioning in August.

UCloud Ulanqab AI data center, Building D: topped out on June 16, with 3,136 cabinets planned and a first batch of 2,352 15kW standard cabinets to be delivered. Once all five buildings on the campus are complete, it can house 12,000 cabinets.

Beijing-Inner Mongolia green computing industrial park phase two: Beijing Uni-Construction Group's No. 2 Company won the general contract, worth about 898 million yuan, covering five computing buildings and 10 power buildings, with completion planned for September 2027.

On the delivered and operating side: Kuaishou Intelligent Cloud's Ulanqab data center, stage two, has been fully delivered, designed for 300,000 servers and more than 60EB of storage. Envision's Ulanqab Galaxy campus announced operations on August 6, with 120,000 square meters of floor area and 2GW of total planned campus capacity. The A1 build-to-suit hall in the north zone of the zero-carbon AI computing base phase one has been delivered, with 1,346 cabinets and about 29.4MW of IT capacity planned. Rongxin Cloud's Ulanqab data center is live as a financial disaster-recovery node.

Chahar Districts Host More Than Half the Projects

By address, 18 of the 33 projects sit in the Chahar districts, including the Chahar high-tech development zone, the industrial park, the economic and technological development zone and the industrial zone, which take in the Bayin area and the Jining logistics park. Jining District has three projects (Zhongjing Yunwang, Xianku and Zhonglian phase one), Chahar Right Middle Banner has two (Chindata and GLP), Chahar Right Rear Banner and Xinghe County have one each, and eight projects have not disclosed a specific park.

Four Signals Worth Watching

High density and liquid cooling are entering the plans. Qishang Online's AI computing center plans 1,280 54kW cabinets, Chenwei's computing center is deploying high-density liquid-cooled cabinets, phase three of Envision's zero-carbon AI computing industrial park comes with a high-efficiency liquid cooling system, and phase one of Zhonglian's Ulanqab green computing center uses liquid cooling with a design PUE as low as 1.19.

Free cooling still does the heavy lifting on delivered capacity. VNET's phase one AI building and the A1 build-to-suit hall at the zero-carbon AI computing base phase one both use air-cooled fluorine pumps, and the latter also channels waste heat from the data halls into building heating. The Kuaishou project leans heavily on energy-saving technologies such as indirect evaporative cooling.

Direct green power supply and integrated generation-grid-load-storage. GDS plans for green power to cover more than 80% of its needs, Qishang Online's cluster is designed for 100% direct green power supply, Envision's Galaxy campus uses a very high share of directly connected green power, GLP's campus is built around integrated generation-grid-load-storage, and VNET has named its new base for compute-and-power convergence.

Compute as a service, measured in tokens. The Yuxi Dianfeng project treats tokens as its main product, with annual service capacity of 10.7 trillion to 75.1 trillion tokens. Envision's Galaxy campus positions itself as a token factory. Chenwei's computing center plans 3,000P (FP16) of AI computing and 5P (FP64) of supercomputing, and will operate as a branch of the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi.

Ulanqab in 2026 is moving from a rush of signings to a rush of filings: 18 filed projects, 43.882 billion yuan of investment and more than 280,000 planned racks make up the bulk of the next build-out phase. IDC Circle sees three things worth tracking from here: how much of the 54 billion yuan in intended investment converts into filings, whether the large campuses filed since August break ground on schedule, and what share of new projects actually deploy high-density liquid-cooled cabinets.

As intelligence becomes a round-the-clock factor of production, and as computing power and electricity constrain and co-evolve with each other inside AIDCs, the IDC value chain is being redefined.