News from China (via CBS):

We drove miles down new roads with multistory going up on either side. Even from the road it was easy to spot the countless racks that will hold servers, semi-conductor chips and cooling and exhaust fans.
There are dozens of data centers being built in Inner Mongolia, more than any other part of the vast nation. The reason they have chosen Ulanqab is because it offers cheap, abundant energy. Fossil fuels are still the main source of power here, but they also use renewables, including wind and solar. . . .
Under President , AI development has become a national strategic priority for China.
“There is no opposition to data centers in China. It’s never heard of, whereas in the U.S., it has become a huge movement against data center building in neighborhoods,” Henry Wang, founder and president of the Center For China and Globalization, told CBS News.
Huawei, Alibaba, Byte Dance, Deepseek, Baidu, Z.ai, ZData and VNET — China’s biggest AI companies — are all active in Inner Mongolia. . . .

Views from China (via the New York Times):

A state-owned newspaper in China recently published a satellite image of a data center in Gainesville, Va., writing in English that the development of artificial intelligence posed a threat to Americans’ physical and financial well-being.
A comic strip made to look as if it had been published by a Maryland news outlet — created with OpenAI’s ChatGPT by people in China, the tech company said — circulated on X this year, blaming data centers for soaring electricity bills. It showed a tycoon smoking a cigar and clutching bags of cash. . . .
China, Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran have sought to use state media outlets to turn the controversy over data centers in the United States into “a domestic fracture point,” according to a new analysis by Alethea, a threat intelligence company, which identified scores of articles and posts on social media this year.

For a bonus point, note this from the CBS quote above:

The reason they have chosen Ulanqab is because it offers cheap, abundant energy. Fossil fuels are still the main source of power here, but they also use renewables, including wind and solar.

Wait, what . . . fossil fuels?

Which type of fossil fuels?

Here’s a clue (via AP):

Seen from the air, the arrays of more than 3 million solar panels shimmering in the desert sun at the Dalad Banner solar farm are arranged in the shape of a galloping horse — a symbol of Inner Mongolia’s nomadic heritage. A short drive away stands one of the region’s many , one which sends electricity 700 kilometers (435 miles) to China’s capital Beijing.
The proximity of the projects embodies what experts describe as an “all-of-the-above” energy approach for Inner Mongolia, which has become China’s largest base of both renewable energy and coal production. Its energy transition mirrors China as a whole: Wind and solar capacity are expanding quickly while coal remains indispensable. . . .
Coal power capacity in Inner Mongolia has continued to expand over the past five years.
“Because wind and solar are intermittent . . . we cannot do without the support of coal-fired power,” said Huang Zhiqiang, vice governor of Inner Mongolia, during a recent news briefing.

Oh.