Sources say campus could come online late 2027 or early 2028
Chinese AI developer DeepSeek is planning to build a 1GW data center in the northern Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, according to a Bloomberg report. DeepSeek is looking to build the data center in the city of Ulanqab, in the province's south-central region.
Sources familiar with the project told Bloomberg that DeepSeek was looking to bring the data center partially online by the end of 2027 or the start of 2028.
DeepSeek rose to prominence in early 2025 when the AI company sent waves through the US stock market with the release of its open-source LLM, which offers comparable performance to the systems produced by top US AI labs, but which was reportedly trained using a fraction of the compute power.
The company is reportedly looking to develop its own AI chip to power its models.
Inner Mongolia is one of the provinces mentioned in the country’s Eastern Data, Western Compute project, which seeks to place large-scale compute infrastructure in China’s western regions.
Fellow Chinese AI champion Z.ai is reportedly partially operating a 1GW data center using Chinese-made chips, but details about the data center’s location, current operational capacity, as well as the identity of the chipmaker, were not disclosed
