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DeepSeek is evidently growing its data center presence in Inner Mongolia.

Having the expertise to run its own data center is one of DeepSeek’s three idiosyncratic advantages I identified in the past. Up until recently, I have assumed that its data centers are primarily located in its home base of Hangzhou or its new R&D presence in Beijing. But as Bloomberg reported, and DeepSeek’s own job advertisement corroborated, the AI lab that shook the world is hiring data center engineers in Inner Mongolia.

Why Inner Mongolia? And why Ulanqab (乌兰察布) of all places, an insignificant town of 1.7 million people (a town by Chinese standard) located on vast grassland?

This is not post speculating about whether DeepSeek smuggled NVIDIA’s Blackwell chips to Inner Mongolia for its own use. I have no idea whether it did that or not.

This is a post about how and why Ulanqab became a desirable data center location for tech firms from Huawei and Alibaba, to Apple and Kuaishou, to now frontier AI labs, like DeepSeek.