VNET Bayin Ulanqab data center, Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia

VNET's data center campus at Bayin, in the Chahar High-Tech Zone of Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, China, is being expanded: in February 2026 the zone's economic development bureau approved a third phase, to be built from March 2026 to March 2028. The approval places it north of Bayin Wei Road 12 and west of Bayin Jing Road 6, with two server buildings, a diesel generator building and a research building.

The demand behind it is ByteDance's: Bloomberg reported in March 2026 that VNET had won a deal to supply the TikTok owner about 500 megawatts of capacity across China for its Doubao chatbot and other AI systems. The South China Morning Post reported that ByteDance was separately discussing five to six gigawatts of capacity in Ulanqab's Jining district, for delivery by early 2028.

Ulanqab, long known as China's potato capital, has turned itself into a data center town: by the end of June 2026 the city had signed 89 data center projects, 86 of them for AI computing, China Newsweek reported. Huawei, Alibaba, Apple and Kuaishou run data centers there, and ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu and DeepSeek have placed large AI model training projects in the city.

In the Chahar zone, large industrial power costs 0.35 to 0.45 yuan a kilowatt hour, less than half the price in eastern China, and land runs 100,000 to 120,000 yuan for a mu, a Chinese land unit close to a sixth of an acre. Ulanqab has set out to be what officials call China's "Token capital," the hub for the computing that trains and runs AI chatbots, though Zhou Haifeng of the Inner Mongolia Economic Society said the city still falls short on talent, capital, industry and technology.

The city averages 4.3 degrees Celsius, cool enough to use outside air to cool servers about ten months a year, and two dedicated fiber cables run to Beijing, 4.2 milliseconds away. VNET signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Chahar zone for the campus on April 18, 2024.

The third phase, with total investment of 3 billion yuan, 600 million of it VNET's own money and 2.4 billion in loans, was approved and recorded on February 2, 2026 by the zone's economic development and investment promotion bureau.