China Tells Its Data Centres to Choose: Cheap and Green, or Always On

For four years China has tried to solve the power problem of computing with geography. Its Eastern Data, Western Compute programme, launched nationwide in 2022, designated eight national computing hubs and ten data centre clusters, steering power-hungry workloads to the western provinces where land and renewable energy are abundant. Latency-sensitive work stayed near users in the east. Artificial intelligence has strained that model, and Beijing's new AI+ energy action plan adds a second tool: price.

As an analysis by the China Policy team published on 30 July puts it, the plan "asks data centres to choose, and to pay for their choice." China's computing facilities used 166 billion kWh of electricity in 2024, about 1.7 per cent of national consumption, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The China Policy analysis says national computing centre consumption reached 170 TWh in 2025, 1.6 per cent of national demand, growing at nearly 40 per cent a year.

Carbon Brief has noted that the International Energy Agency put Chinese data centre demand at about 100 TWh in 2024, while other forecasts reach 600 TWh by 2030. At Zhongjin Data's zero-carbon computing base in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, AI training shifts to midday when solar output peaks and data backup moves to night when wind is strong, releasing more than 30 per cent of capacity as flexible load. Large renewable energy bases and national computing hubs are to be coordinated, with facilities and backbone network access points concentrated in regions whose energy, water and land can support them.

In July 2025 the NDRC turned that into a formal consumption obligation, adding a green electricity consumption ratio for new data centres at national hub nodes to the list of key energy-using industries, alongside steel, cement and polysilicon. China is building a market for flexible data centre demand in a power sector that has been administratively priced for most of its history, the China Policy analysis notes. The approach also shows how China sees the trade-off that every grid faces.