Have you ever heard of Ulanqab prefecture, a small (by China’s standards) jurisdiction of 1.5 million people lost in the middle of the Inner Mongolian steppe? Didn’t think so.
In fact, when I asked my wife, who is Chinese and travelled almost everywhere in China - including twice in Inner Mongolia with me - she herself had never heard about it. So it’s fair to say this place isn’t exactly a household name, even in China.
This is because, by any standard, this place is pretty unremarkable. Check its Wikipedia page and you’ll see the only thing it’s famous for is being the birthplace of He Pingping, who briefly held the Guinness record for world’s shortest man.
That’s it, that’s the list!
Except - and I know you felt this was coming - there is one interesting statistic that ought to tell you there is more to this place that meets the eye: this tiny prefecture of 1.5 million people consumes nearly 1% of all of China's electricity. And I did write consume, not produce.
When you divide every kilowatt-hour Ulanqab burns by its 795,000 households, each one “consumes” about 105,000 kWh in electricity, roughly 10 times the U.S. average (when U.S. households normally consume about 5X what Chinese households do). Those are insane electricity consumption numbers.
So what are the Ulanqabese doing? Are they all running 10 American households' worth of appliances, or is it something else?
This other interesting fact about Ulanqab might clue you in on the answer: over the past few years, this unremarkable prefecture has quietly signed over half a trillion yuan (yes, that’s trillion, with a “T”) worth of investment deals from all the major Chinese tech giants.
This is the story of how a tiny place in China almost no-one has heard of became the most important place in China’s AI future - and possibly the world’s.