Apple Ulanqab data center, Inner Mongolia, China

Apple's data center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, opened to store iCloud data for northern China, built in the big data zone of the city's Chahar Industrial Park. Apple signed the deal with Ulanqab at a ceremony in Hohhot in early February 2018, agreeing to build and run the center through a local company using 100 percent renewable energy. Ground broke on March 15, 2019, power was switched on that December 17, and the site now covers 101,012 square meters of buildings, generators and a diesel tank yard, fed by its own 110-kilovolt substation.

The center exists because of China's cybersecurity law, which requires iCloud data for Chinese users to stay in the country; China Daily named the operator as Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, owned by the Guizhou provincial government, which also runs Apple's first Chinese data center in Guizhou. Apple handed Chinese iCloud accounts to the Guizhou company on February 28, 2018, and Reporters Without Borders urged journalists and bloggers to move their accounts out of the country or close them. "Apple promises that it will never give governments a backdoor to content, but there is no way of being sure about this," said Cedric Alviani, head of the group's East Asia bureau.

Ulanqab calls itself the Grassland Cloud Valley; Huawei was already in the area when Apple arrived, and by 2022 the city had signed 17 data center companies to 26 projects worth about 73.2 billion yuan, including Alibaba, Kuaishou and Xpeng. The city sits less than 300 kilometers from Beijing and has an average annual temperature of 4.3 degrees Celsius.