The Inner Mongolian Steppe Is Now a Server Farm, by James Leibold – 19 May 2026

AI, Energy, and Settler Colonialism in Inner Mongolia

Bill Bishop’s reporting this morning on Li Qiang and Ding Xuexiang’s recent comments on AI and computing power caught my eye. One phrase in particular stood out: the “Inner Mongolia Multi-Cloud Computing Resources Monitoring and Scheduling Platform” [内蒙古多云算力资源监测与调度平台].

What exactly is this platform? And why should anyone interested in Chinese settler colonialism in Southern Mongolia care? Put bluntly: does Chinese resource extraction now have a digital face?

With a bit of digging, I was surprised to learn about state media claims that Inner Mongolia now has a total computing-power capacity of 126,000 petaflops, including 116,000 petaflops dedicated to AI computing [人工智能算力], ranking first in China. It also claims that the region’s data centres use 84.57 percent “green electricity,” making Inner Mongolia a national model for “sustainable digital infrastructure.”

That sounds futuristic. It is also built on older frontier logics.

Inner Mongolia produces more than a quarter of China’s raw coal. At the same time, it is being remade into one of the country’s largest renewable-energy bases, with vast wind, solar, and solar-thermal projects spreading across its deserts, grasslands, and industrial corridors. In 2024, regional statistics claim Inner Mongolia generated roughly 8–9 percent of China’s total electricity (roughly 834 TWh), more than the annual electricity consumption of many G20 economies. It also produced more than 200 TWh of “new energy” electricity, with total new-energy installed capacity reaching about 135 GW by the end of the year.

To put that in perspective, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that all data centres worldwide consumed about 460 TWh of electricity in 2024 and may consume around 945 TWh by 2030. Inner Mongolia’s total electricity generation in 2024 was already about 1.8 times global data-centre electricity consumption in 2024, and close to the IEA’s projected global data-centre demand for 2030.

That is the key point: Inner Mongolia is not merely hosting data centres; it is one of the few places on earth with an electricity system large enough to make AI-scale industrialisation plausible without immediately breaking the grid.

Its proximity to Beijing, Tianjin, and North China’s major super-compute users makes this even more significant. Under the “East Data, West Computing” strategy [东数西算], computation is deliberately shifted away from coastal demand centres and into inland energy bases. Inner Mongolia is being positioned as a frontier AI infrastructure zone: coal-backed, renewable-branded, grid-connected, and politically central to China’s next stage of digital industrialisation.

This is where the settler-colonial question enters. For decades, Inner Mongolia has been treated as a resource frontier: first land, then coal, rare earths, livestock, and energy. Now compute itself is being layered onto that extractive geography. The data centre does not replace the coal mine, the wind farm, or the transmission line. It sits on top of them.

Thus, perhaps the sharper question is not whether Inner Mongolia is becoming “green” or “digital.” But whether China’s old frontier-development model is being upgraded for the AI age. The party-state is extracting energy, land, and now computing capacity from the borderlands while continuing to integrate, discipline, and assimilate the region’s Indigenous Mongol population into Xi Jinping’s China Dream and the “collective consciousness” of the Chinese nation.

James Leibold is a Professor of Politics and Asian Studies in the Department of Politics, Media, and Philosophy at La Trobe University in Australia. His research explores the politics of ethnicity, race, and national identity in modern China, with a current focus on colonial-style nation-building projects in the borderlands of contemporary China.

This article first appeared on James Leibold’s Substack and is republished here with permission.

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