Along comes Ulanqab… a ‘tiny place in Mongolia that you’ve probably never heard of: Ulanqab prefecture…. It’s sparsely populated, 1.5 million people… on windswept grassland on the Mongolian plateau… there is more to this place — (Editor: Much more) than meets the eye…’
Ulanqab
By Arnaud Bertrand
September13, 2026
* https://substack.com/@arnaudbertrand/note/c-336579522
What Is Going On?
‘What is going on… is the most ambitious data center buildup anywhere on earth – and it’s really surprising this hasn’t been talked about more because the scale is beyond anything else, and by an immense margin.
Take Elon Musk’s so-called “Colossus” datacenter in Memphis, Tenessee which he pitches as “the world’s largest AI supercomputer.”
According to their own numbers (x.ai/colossus), Colossus has 200,000 chips, which, let’s be clear, is already super impressive.
In datacenter lingo, this converts to roughly 5000 to 6000 “racks”: you know, the cabinets full of blinking lights you see in every movie scene set in a server room.
How many racks are they building in Ulanqab? Over 5 million.
Yes, about one thousand times the scale of “Colossus” 🤯
I *(AB) tripled checked the number: it is indeed the official number published by authoritative sources such as to “Science and Technology Daily”, the official newspaper of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (stdaily.com/web/gdxw/20…).
This is an absurdly large amount of compute.
What we see appearing in this Inner Mongolian steppe may be the closest thing to a world brain humanity has ever built – a place where a large share of the world’s thinking will physically happen.
And – as we’ll see – what makes this story so fascinating is not just the scale, but why it’s getting build in this particular patch of Inner Mongolian grassland which combines a number of characteristics unlike anywhere else.
If you believe, as I *(AB) do – and as both China and the US obviously do as well – that AI will be the defining technology of the 21st century, this makes Ulanqab one of the single most relevant geopolitical places in the world right now…’
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StrategicDemands.com
Read More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulanqab
https://www.stdaily.com/web/gdxw/2026-08/20/content_567111.html
Envision Energy … DeepSeek
The world’s largest single AI data center building, Galaxy Campus integrates renewable energy, intelligent power management and high-density computing at unprecedented scale.
‘Green AI computing capacity’…
China Announcement
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202608/1367666.shtml
https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202608/08/WS6a766a12a310986e2b469a81.html
https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/geopolitics/ulanqab-china-ai-data-center-hub
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/14/donald-trump-ai-regulation-pushback-01074230 (Sept. 2026)
https://apnews.com/article/trump-ai-regulation-executive-order-state-laws-9cb4dd1bc249e404260b3dc233217388 (Dec. 2025)
https://apnews.com/article/trump-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-ai-23a0e44ab05402ddfe9cdfd0bffa0ade (June 2026)
China Leaps Forward Powered by Clean Energy
Data Centers Transitioning to Renewable Energy
The Largest AI Data Center(s) on Earth
China is powering up with Clean, Green Energy, while the U.S. is blocking Clean, Green Energy
Ask yourself which country is preparing ‘smarter and better’ for a successful economic future?
Are Fossil Fuels a better bet? Or, is Going Green a smarter bet?
Don’t forget to factor in decades of Mideast wars continuing to be fought and paid for in blood and treasure by the United States…
And geopolitical realities, escalating and deep ongoing costs to protect fossil fuel oil/gas supplies…
Trillions USD $ spent overseas… with a Petrodollar/international currency exchange system now at risk and a multilateral world of nations turning away from the United States due to failed U.S. wars and failing national security policies…
A New Vision of Security is a necessity: Disasters in foreign policy must be relegated to history, learned from, and not repeated…
Time for a New Definition of National Security
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