China's Galaxy datacenter rivals US Stargate scale
SemiAnalysis: We Visited China’s Stargate in Inner Mongolia
Stargate Abilene has become the symbol of America’s AI buildout. It is a gigawatt-scale campus on the Texas plains built for OpenAI. China has campuses on a similar scale, though few people outside the country have had a look inside. In September, we visited one, and we found the speed, scale, ultra low cost, and deep vertical integration astonishing.During the trip, we toured Inner Mongolia, China’s fastest-growing AI datacenter region. It's the “West Texas” of China, bu
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A Chinese datacenter campus in Inner Mongolia called Galaxy is being built to a scale comparable to America's Stargate facility in Texas, with planned capacity of up to 800MW. The first phase of 120MW was completed within a year at a fraction of US construction costs, using innovative approaches including direct DC power conversion with solid-state transformers, cooling systems without central chillers, and deep vertical integration where the owner company manufactures many components on-site. This matters because China's datacenter development demonstrates construction speeds, cost efficiency, and technical approaches that differ significantly from US practices, while Inner Mongolia is becoming the country's fastest-growing AI datacenter region with over 25GW of announced projects and no local opposition to development. The broader context is that industrial companies with expertise in energy, construction, or electrical equipment are pivoting into AI infrastructure across China, where datacenter projects create new demand for equipment they already produce.
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