A city in Inner Mongolia is quietly powering China's AI boom

Ordos sits in Inner Mongolia — cheap energy, open land, a few hundred kilometers from Beijing. That combination makes it one of the country's hottest spots for data centers, the buildings where the actual computing happens. A Wired investigation maps how this unlikely place has become the backbone of a massive push to build AI infrastructure.

The story isn't about who's funding it or what models are being trained. It's about the physical setup: why this particular patch of northern China, with its grid access and cooling air, keeps attracting the big warehouse-style facilities. Data centers are thirsty for power and space. The geography lines up.

Why this matters for us: the same forces driving compute buildout in one corner of the world are shaping the global supply chain for the chips and energy we'll need — and the prices we'll pay.