[HN Gopher] China's Data Center Boom: A View from Zhangjiakou (2...
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China's Data Center Boom: A View from Zhangjiakou (2025)
Author : fzliu
Score : 23 points
Date : 2026-02-10 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sinocities.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sinocities.substack.com)
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| They really should be building such things deep underground, at
| least to offer some basic protection against the various
| adversaries.
|
| I assume we do too...we do right?
| FpUser wrote:
| Why? I think any attack on China, Russia, India by major power
| will quickly escalate to nuclear. At this stage everyone will
| have much bigger problem than worry about datacenters.
| adventured wrote:
| It would very slowly escalate toward nuclear, and then all at
| once.
|
| Nuclear rhetoric would escalate rapidly by the losing /
| weaker side.
|
| It's a common fallacy that conflict between two nuclear
| powers would instantly jump to nuclear exchange. That isn't
| how it would go at all, although the propaganda that it would
| does likely help to prevent wars. Nobody is interested in
| vaporizing all of their own people by starting a nuclear
| exchange from the first bullets fired. There would be various
| high-intensity inflection points, triggers, that would risk
| nuclear escalation: when one side or the other starts losing
| a lot of territory; when one side or the other loses a major
| city; when one side or the other is at risk of operational
| collapse (leading to more rapid losses in the field); when
| one side or the other is at risk of losing their core
| territory / capital; and so on. The key inflection points
| would be prime candidates for nuclear threats, to try to get
| the winning side to stop or back off immediately or else.
| From there it'd be a complex equation as to when a side would
| actually finally set off a nuke (would it be a warning nuke
| first, etc).
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I doubt it. Maybe a full fledged invasion might get nuclear
| but mutually assured destruction is a pretty solid deterrent.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Pretty much, they aren't going to trust each other that an
| incoming missile is not armed with a nuclear payload.
| yorwba wrote:
| Mao tried picking industrial locations for survivability in
| case of war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Front_(China)
| Turns out that places that are hard to reach for the enemy are
| also hard to reach in peacetime, so the project was ultimately
| abandoned.
| missedthecue wrote:
| MAD is far too intact with China to bomb random infrastructure
| with reckless abandon.
| jankeymeulen wrote:
| From the article: 1.859 billion kWh. Divide by 1 year = 212
| megawatt. Definitely not small. Not that gigantic either,
| compared to current day (US) AI/hyperscalers.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's about the delta. Similar kinds of buildouts weren't common
| 3-5 years ago.
|
| China as well as India are seeing a significant buildout of DC
| capacity which is partially a result of subsidies but also a
| result of increased demand for services domestically as well as
| within APAC.
|
| While local politicans in the US are using populist
| misinformation such as water usage to push back against DC
| buildouts, you're seeing both China [0] and India [1] offering
| multi-decade subsidizes and tax shelters to build out DC
| capacity, which leads to a snowball effect as supply chains and
| ecosystems start shifting to those centers of gravity - this is
| what happened to semiconductor fabrication (Upstate NY to
| Taiwan/SK) and Cybersecurity (Bay Area/Boston to
| Israel/CEE/India) 15 years ago.
|
| Additionally, this is essentially HPC and best in breed
| hardware doesn't neccesarily equate to outcompeting a large
| amount of less performant but scaled out compute, which is the
| path both China and India are adopting by pushing hyperscalers
| to (in China's case) use domestic vendors or (in India's case)
| transfer the entire IP chain to an Indian subsidiary. This is
| why you see Amazon announce layoffs [2] while committing to
| spend tens of billions of dollars in India's hyperscaler
| buildout [3] or Marvell expanding in Vietnam [6] after a
| similar sized layoff [7].
|
| Barely 10 years ago, states like California, NC, etc used to
| use similar strategies to compete with each other and build out
| innovation hubs, but state and local level politicking has led
| to public-private partnerships stagnating and incentivized
| beancounters like me to seriously consider offshoring or
| shutting down "innovation centers" in RTP/Boulder/ATX tier
| hubs.
|
| CHIPS and the IRA were on the right track, but even Dems [4]
| and the EU [5] as well as the GOP tried to stymie it.
|
| [0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/china-offers-
| tech...
|
| [1] - https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/01/india-offers-zero-
| taxes-th...
|
| [2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-
| plans-...
|
| [3] - https://www.aboutamazon.in/news/economic-impact/amazon-
| econo...
|
| [4] -
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/us/politics/semiconductor...
|
| [5] - https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/11/09/europe-shows-a-
| united-fr...
|
| [6] - https://www.marvell.com/company/newsroom/marvell-
| accelerates...
|
| [7] - https://www.crn.com/news/computing/semiconductor-firm-
| marvel...
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(page generated 2026-02-10 23:01 UTC)