Inner Mongolia

A critical question is whether the Ascend 960 will be powerful enough to train frontier AI models.

Chinese developers still rely heavily on Nvidia chips for training their most advanced systems, although domestic processors are increasingly used to operate completed models huawei is already gaining ground deep seek reportedly plans to install at least 160 000 to send 950 dt chips at a new inner mongolia data center we know inner mongolia is a province of china it is not part of the sovereign country mongolia that lies to the north The company is also exploring opportunities in Malaysia and Egypt as China promotes its technology infrastructure internationally.

However, Huawei continues to face production constraints and limited access to advanced foreign manufacturing equipment and high-performance memory.

Strong demand recently prompted it to increase Ascend 950DT prices by 60%.

But they are building massive data centers.

I saw an image of a data center in Inner Mongolia.

that will be the biggest data center in the world.

It will be bigger than Colossus.

I'm not on the same page, to put it shortly, of, of many of his observations.

But if he's right here, uh, and this is not really political as much as it is about an actual data center build-out going on in China's, um, what are these called? A region or, uh, area of Inner Mongolia, uh, where they are building something on a scale of a thousand times of what Elon Musk's Colossus can do, according to at least his, uh, report here.

There's a longer Substack article which is pay only, but a lot of the, uh, uh, specifics on the scale of this, which is absolutely staggering, by the way, suggests that China is really trying to build something on the, on the hyperscaling front that goes far beyond what even the rest of the world is doing.

So clearly, China finds this as a strategic, uh, uh, build-out that needs to happen.

Uh, I'll put a link in to Ole's COT report.

You can look at the various, uh, positioning changes across, uh, the futures complex in the US.

The Arnaud Bertrand, uh, post on this, uh, titanic, uh, build-out of a data center in Inner Mongolia.

And then, uh, the latest, uh, [chuckles] enormously entertaining and very different take on this so-called Hugging Face incident.

The morning air in this part of Inner Mongolia has a different weight to it this time of year.

It is not heavy with humidity, but rather carries a dry, crisp clarity that seems to stretch the horizon further than it did just a week ago.

I am sitting at a small wooden table outside a neighborhood bakery near my guesthouse, watching the steam rise from a paper cup of tea.

interesting.

When you're talking about the format, it made me think last year I was in Ordos in Inner Mongolia, which was previously known as the big ghost city, right? It's a very interesting place.

But one of the places that I went to go visit was this... almost forbidden palace.

It was huge.

And they used it primarily for video production and shooting.

Yeah.

And it probably had taken them years and years millions if not billions of dollars to construct this massive site that just went on sprawling forever and now I think about today that could all be just constructed so easily and changed so easily with AI that you wouldn't even need that so the changing investments of that is massive I guess now you could instead of this structure out in Inner Mongolia they're building data centers instead to to be able to construct all these virtual worlds yeah Really interesting.

And I think the other thing that struck me was I guess I didn't – I really expected this for short dramas because short drama to me is something – or microdrama is something that you – it's not something that you're looking for high quality.