On a 760-acre island on the Yangtze River, rice fields are being turned into a series of huge server farms as part of China’s effort to consolidate its position as an artificial intelligence superpower.
The building work in the farming city of Wuhu is an effort to “build the Stargate of China”, said an executive at a supplier for one of the projects, referring to the $500bn plan by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to build the world’s largest AI data centre in Texas.
The Wuhu “mega-cluster” will not match the scale of the US project. It forms only one part of Beijing’s greater oversight of the country’s fragmented data centres to make them better equipped to handle booming AI demand from consumers.
This move comes in response to the strong lead held by the US over access to AI computing capacity, with research group Epoch AI estimating America has around three-quarters of the global computing power, compared to 15 per cent in China.
In March, Beijing unveiled a plan to have existing data centres in remote regions in the west focus on training large language models.
Meanwhile, new server farms are being built in locations closer to key population centres. These will focus on “inference” — the process through which AI tools such as chatbots generate responses, with closer physical proximity to users designed to allow for faster AI applications.