In the desert outside Zhongwei, in the northwestern region of Ningxia, four dedicated power lines now run from a field of solar panels to a cluster of computers.
They do not pass through the public grid. That detail, dull as it sounds, is the whole point.
China is encouraging its sprawling data centre industry to plug directly into wind and solar generation, rather than draw power off a grid still heavily fed by coal. The push is part policy, part demonstration.
Beijing’s 2026 government work report named tighter integration between computing infrastructure and electricity supply as a priority, and a national green-data-centre plan now requires new projects in the country’s designated computing hubs to source most of their power from clean sources.
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The Zhongwei plant is the project everyone points to. China Datang Corp commissioned a 500-megawatt solar farm there, describing it as the country’s first large-scale green-power project built to supply a data centre cluster directly.
It entered formal operation in early May, after green-power direct supply began in February, according to Chinese state media.
What makes it unusual is the delivery. The site uses what Datang calls a dual-track structure: four dedicated 110-kilovolt lines carry electricity straight to the computing facilities, with additional demand covered through bilateral market trades.
Solar output is prioritised during the day, wind is expected to cover the evenings, and storage smooths the gaps.
The solar plant alone should generate around 970 gigawatt-hours a year, roughly half the cloud base’s projected demand.
The numbers grow once the wind component arrives. The 500MW solar array is the first slice of a 2-gigawatt first phase that pairs it with a 1.5GW wind farm and storage, at a planned cost of about 8.7 billion yuan, or some $1.27bn.
The wind build is still under construction, scheduled for full grid connection in September.
Once phase one is complete, annual generation is expected to reach 4.3 terawatt-hours, more than the cloud base’s forecast consumption of 2.29 terawatt-hours. A second phase would push the total to 4.6GW.
The logic sits inside China’s “east data, west computing” strategy, which steers energy-hungry processing toward western regions where wind and solar are plentiful and land is cheap. Demand is the pressure behind all of it.
AI has driven an explosion in computing capacity, and with it electricity use, at exactly the moment Beijing is trying to hit peak carbon emissions by 2030.
The ambition is steep. Authorities want renewables to supply roughly four-fifths of the AI data-centre sector’s power by 2030, up from around a tenth in 2023.
The gap between a single working project in the desert and that national target is the part the policy has not yet closed.
Curtailment, grid bottlenecks, and the intermittency of wind and solar remain real, and China’s green-power goals for AI have already run into the grid before.
For now, Zhongwei is the test case. If desert wind and sun can be matched to digital load without leaning on the conventional grid, the model travels. If they cannot, it stays a handsome demonstration in Ningxia.
The wind turbines are due in September, that is when the figures stop being projections.
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