China Expands Data Center Capacity Using Renewable Energy

China generated more than twice the electricity produced in the United States in 2025, according to Al Jazeera reporting. The country added more than 430 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity that year, accounting for more than half of global renewable additions.

Beijing is linking new data centers directly to renewable projects under the East Data, West Computing initiative. A 500-megawatt wind and solar facility in Ningxia began supplying a China Datang cloud data center through a dedicated transmission line on May 12.

The United States operated 5,427 data centers in 2025, compared with 449 in China, according to Stanford University’s AI Index. Data centers consumed 415 terawatt-hours of electricity worldwide in 2024, with the United States accounting for 45 percent and China 25 percent.

China’s data center racks grew 30 percent annually from 2016 to 2023. Capacity is projected to reach 60 gigawatts by 2030, nearly double current levels and equal to 2.3 percent of national electricity demand.

Modular data centers built by Huawei can be completed in six months, compared with at least one year for similar facilities in the United States, Leah Fahy of Capital Economics told Al Jazeera. At least 36 U.S. data center projects were blocked or stalled between May 2024 and June 2025.

China’s power grid remains organized at the provincial level, with transmission corridors functioning mainly as one-way flows, Anders Hove of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies said. Some eastern cities have already restricted new data center construction due to local supply constraints.

Developers in China are assembling clusters of different hardware systems, which Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institution said complicates AI workload management. Some projects have encountered build-quality problems when developers lack experience with complex facilities.