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Current Affairs

China’s localised data centre push drives AI ambitions amid overbuilding concerns

Despite their strikingly different approaches to developing and deploying artificial intelligence, one aspect is common across China and the United States: data and computing centres…

By Samantha Johnson / July 27, 2026

Despite their strikingly different approaches to developing and deploying artificial intelligence, one aspect is common across China and the United States: data and computing centres are proliferating in both countries, especially in remote locations.

While the US is seeing residents and localities fight back against plans for data centres in their backyards, regional officials in China are embracing them. In fact, in China there is a nationwide scramble for such facilities – considered the backbone of AI – with some major cities losing out to towns and counties when it comes to new investments in the field.

While the speed and scale of the buildout align with Beijing’s overarching tech push, some experts are concerned that an overzealous data centre race may lead to overbuilt infrastructure.

In Shatian, a small coastal town in Dongguan city in southern Guangdong province, municipal authorities announced an aggressive plan earlier this month to invest 100 billion yuan (US$14.7 billion) to build a 9,000-acre data and computing park on a barren island, with scheduled completion by 2030.

In eastern Zhejiang province, the little-known county of Jiashan bordering Shanghai has opened the first phase of a 5 billion yuan data centre with a capacity of 15,000 petaflops per second, a unit equivalent to 1 quadrillion calculations. When fully completed, the total capacity will double.

The data centre, designed for training next-generation AI models as well as molecular and drug development, would process data faster than traditional supercomputers in the US, according to Zhejiang media reports, citing local officials.

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