China is stepping up its push for smarter and more efficient industrial infrastructure, as the country launches the world’s first prefabricated energy hub for computing facilities and establishes a nationwide four-tier smart factory system.

Unveiled on Saturday in Qingdao, eastern Shandong province, the prefabricated base acts as the “heart” of the computing centres by providing green power to run the massive facilities, according to a report by state broadcaster China Central Television on the same day.

It was being connected to data centres built by enterprises and set to be adopted by national-level computing facilities in the second half of 2026.

Compared with the previous energy facilities for data centres, the new energy hub, established by Qingdao-based electricity equipment company TGOOD, allows for direct connection to green electricity and boasts “100 per cent green electricity consumption”, according to CCTV.

The new hub was designed to lower the required land footprint by more than 30 per cent and cut overall costs by 20 per cent. It also enables power and computing power to work in sync under a smart system, potentially driving down computing power prices, it added.

The launch came as part of broader efforts by Beijing to coordinate the expansion of computing capacity with renewable energy development, as rising power demand from artificial intelligence adds pressure to China’s electricity grid.