❯ Xiaohongshu Plans $2.2B, 600 MW Data Center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia

ULANQABPer South China Morning Post sources, Xiaohongshu is planning a 600 MW data center in or west of Ulanqab’s urban area, Inner Mongolia, on a budget of roughly RMB 15 billion (US$2.2 billion) — excluding chip costs. It would be the Shanghai-based company’s largest infrastructure investment to date.

WHYThe name Ulanqab has been surfacing frequently of late. About 350 km northwest of Beijing, it offers cheap land and low power tariffs, making it one of the primary hosts for China’s AI infrastructure buildout; earlier reports have suggested DeepSeek is also placing compute capacity there. The broader backdrop: Bloomberg reports Beijing is weighing a five-year data center investment program of roughly RMB 2 trillion (US$295 billion), with Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Gansu as priority regions. Xiaohongshu’s own cadence lines up: earlier reporting values the company at US$31 billion, an IPO is in preparation, and it has already released open-source models — a content platform building its own compute typically means it intends to carry both recommendation and generation workloads itself.

NO CHIPSBy the sources’ framing, “excluding chip costs” is the most information-dense part of this story: it lifts chip supply, the single biggest uncertainty, cleanly out of the budget sheet. For rivals competing for the same tranche of capacity, the 600 MW power allocation is locked in; the gap sits on the card side. Zooming out to the industry level, this round of China’s data center investment is tilting away from cloud-vendor-led buildout toward application companies building in-house, and internet platforms’ capex sheets have gained a long new line item: electricity.

▪ SIGNALPower can be bought; cards may not be — two different ledgers.