In the peak of summer, hot winds sweep across the ravines of the Loess Plateau in Qingyang, Gansu. Inside the National Data Center Cluster (Gansu·Qingyang) ‘East-South Computing Power Transfer’ Industrial Park, steel structures gleam silver under the sun as tower cranes swing back and forth. Just two years ago, this area was a cornfield; today, modern data centers are sprouting from the yellow earth. Chang Sheng, project manager of the Smart Blueprint Western Intelligent Computing Center, stands by the construction site, observing the bustling activity. He explains that the first phase of the project will achieve a computing power scale of 108,000 P, with civil works and electromechanical systems required to be delivered simultaneously by October 30. Even before construction began, all computing capacity was fully booked. This is the first layer of logic behind Qingyang’s ‘gravity field.’
The source of this gravity lies in green electricity and cost advantages. Shi Taixu, head of the Digital Economy Section at the Qingyang Data Bureau, analyzes that Qingyang boasts four inherent advantages for developing computing power: location, climate, geology, and electricity. However, what truly attracts a large number of enterprises to set up operations is the tangible benefit of electricity pricing. Qingyang has innovatively introduced a ‘green electricity aggregation’ direct supply model, stabilizing the electricity price for park users at 0.398 yuan per kilowatt-hour, which is 30% to 50% lower than in the eastern regions. A medium-sized data center consuming 10 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per month could save between 20 million and 50 million yuan annually in Qingyang. Li Yazhou, project manager at Gansu Mobile’s Computing Power Branch, deeply understands this. Gansu Mobile has built the nation’s first ‘prefabricated + micro-module’ industrial data center in the park, delivered in just 100 days—a reduction of 20 months compared to traditional construction timelines. ‘Electricity prices are cheaper here, saving tens of millions of yuan a year,’ Li says. Currently, the park has implemented the first pilot project for direct green electricity supply to data centers nationwide. Among the eight major computing power nodes in the national ‘East-South Computing Power Transfer’ plan, this is a unique advantage. Other nodes only allocate green electricity quotas, requiring enterprises to build their own renewable energy stations; in Qingyang, the government uniformly constructs and connects to the grid, integrating direct green electricity supply with energy storage. Low electricity prices are the source of gravity, but cost advantages alone are not enough. For computing power to truly be ‘used,’ it relies on networks; for it to truly ‘grow,’ it relies on an industrial ecosystem.
The pulse of this gravity is network connectivity and industrial development. Leveraging its location at the geometric center of China’s territory, Qingyang has built a ‘1-3-7-14’ millisecond network latency circle. In large model training, reducing inter-node communication latency by 1 millisecond can improve overall training efficiency by several percentage points. If the network is the ‘artery,’ then the industrial ecosystem is the soil that allows computing power to truly ‘grow.’ Shi Taixu describes Qingyang’s industrial ecosystem using the terms ‘skeleton’ and ‘flesh’: the skeleton is infrastructure anchored by the national hub node, supported by intelligent computing centers, and powered by all-optical network arteries; the flesh is a full-chain industry involving over 700 enterprises, spanning upstream chip development (e.g., Suiyuan Technology, Loongson Technology), midstream computing services (e.g., Jinshan Cloud, Capital Online), and downstream large model applications (e.g., Moonshot AI, Zhipu AI, DeepSeek). A complete industrial chain covering ‘chip-computing-model-application’ has been formed.
Computing power is not only ‘growing’ in server rooms but also beginning to ‘grow’ in fields. In Baimapu Town, Qingcheng County, an intelligent frost protection system successfully prevented extreme low temperatures from damaging apple blossoms. In Dongzhi Town, Xifeng District, the Ruixue apple base, established through digital map analysis, achieved a 85% high-quality fruit rate in 2024, increasing household income by an average of 2,000 yuan. The ‘Data-Computing Fusion 5G-A Intelligent Mine’ project at Huaneng Qingyang Coal and Power is making traditional energy extraction safer and more efficient. As of now, the computing power scale of the Qingyang data center cluster has exceeded 185,000 P, with intelligent computing accounting for over 99% and handling more than 25% of the AI Token computing demands for independent models nationwide. Among the eight major hub nodes in the country, Qingyang has become the cluster with the fastest growth rate, largest incremental increase, highest proportion of intelligent computing, and most sufficient consumption of computing power.
In its recruitment strategy, Qingyang has transitioned from ‘policy-based investment attraction’ to ‘ecosystem-based investment attraction’: After China Mobile settled in, it helped bring in leading companies like Jinshan Cloud and Capital Online; Jinshan Cloud then collaborated with Xiaomi and other ecosystem partners, further driving industrial clustering, truly achieving the effect of ‘attracting one, bringing in a chain, and gathering into a cluster.’
The core of this gravity is Tokens and the future. In Qingyang’s planning, the ultimate goal is to make computing power a universal public good, as accessible as water and electricity. The Smart Blueprint project is based on this concept, positioning itself as a ‘Token factory’—promoting the industry’s upgrade from ‘selling server racks’ to ‘selling Tokens.’ ‘Future computing resources will be dispatched like a power grid, with enterprises solely responsible for providing computing capacity, and end users consuming on demand and paying in real time,’ Chang Sheng envisions. On the Loess Plateau, the fans of data centers hum softly. Those electrical signals travel through optical fibers, cross the Qinling Mountains, and reach terminals thousands of miles away, transforming into an intelligent conversation, an AI-generated image, or a decision for autonomous driving. Qingyang’s computing power ‘wheat fields’ are rising—this is not just a numerical stack of 185,000 P, but a way for a western city to redefine itself in the era of the digital economy.
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