We Visited China's Stargate in Inner Mongolia

A September visit to Envision Group’s Galaxy campus in Ulanqab presents Inner Mongolia as a rapidly expanding center for Chinese AI infrastructure. Galaxy is planned for 800MW of IT capacity, comparable to the core of the Stargate campus in Texas; its first 120MW phase was completed in a year at roughly one-fifth of US costs. Envision’s ambitions in the region total 3GW, while Inner Mongolia has announced 25GW of datacenter projects. Unlike US regions facing resistance to new facilities, the area is mobilizing extensive construction labor and directing renewable power toward new industrial demand.

Galaxy’s defining feature is Envision’s integration of energy supply and datacenter systems. Under a source-grid-load-storage model, dedicated wind farms, batteries and power lines supply the campus, with 420MW of wind intended to cover over 60% of the first two phases’ 240MW load. Oversized, geographically separated wind farms and four-hour batteries increase supply reliability. Envision also makes or integrates equipment inside the campus, including a pilot 800V DC system in a 5MW hall: solid-state transformers convert 10kV AC directly to rack power, bypassing several conventional conversion and backup stages. Cooling likewise departs from common US practice: air- and liquid-cooled servers share a water loop without a central chiller plant, a design already used at scale in northern China. Together, these choices offer practical examples for questions still open in US datacenter development.