RedNote reportedly plans 600MW data center campus in Inner Mongolia's Ulanqab

Chinese social media giant RedNote is exploring the development of a massive 600MW data center campus in Inner Mongolia, according to a report by the South China Morning Post. The project, which would be situated in or near the city of Ulanqab, carries an estimated budget of around 15 billion yuan ($2.2 billion), excluding semiconductor costs, a person familiar with the matter said.

The potential development underscores the rapid expansion of AI-driven compute demand in China, where major internet and AI firms are racing to secure large-scale infrastructure. RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, has reportedly been in discussions with Chinese data center operator Vnet, which operated approximately 783MW of data center capacity as of September 2025, about the project. A partnership with Vnet would provide RedNote with an experienced operator to manage the build-out and operations of such a sizable campus.

The news follows a Bloomberg report from last week indicating that DeepSeek, a leading Chinese AI company, is also planning to develop a data center in Ulanqab. That campus is expected to offer 1GW of capacity and is slated to come partially online by the end of 2027 or the start of 2028, according to a source familiar with the company's plans. The concentration of large-scale projects in Ulanqab highlights the region's growing importance as a hub for compute infrastructure in China.

Inner Mongolia is one of the provinces designated under China's Eastern Data, Western Compute project, a national initiative aimed at placing large-scale compute infrastructure in the country's western regions to take advantage of abundant energy resources and cooler climates. This policy framework has made the region an attractive destination for hyperscale data center developments, particularly those serving AI workloads that require significant power and cooling.

RedNote, a social platform often compared to Pinterest and Instagram, gained significant traction in the United States in late 2024 and early 2025 amid concerns that TikTok would be banned if its parent company ByteDance failed to sell the app to American buyers. The app's user base surged during that period, though its primary market remains China, where it operates as a major lifestyle and content platform.

The potential 600MW campus would place RedNote among a growing list of Chinese firms investing heavily in dedicated AI and cloud infrastructure. Fellow Chinese AI champion Z.ai is reportedly partially operating a 1GW data center using Chinese-made chips, though details about its location, current operational capacity, and the identity of the chipmaker have not been disclosed. These developments reflect a broader trend of Chinese technology companies building out substantial compute capacity to support AI model training and inference at scale.

The scale of these projects also raises questions about power availability and grid capacity in Inner Mongolia, as multiple gigawatt-level campuses come online in the same region. Energy constraints could become a limiting factor for the pace of development, prompting companies to explore renewable energy sourcing and other mitigation strategies as part of their site selection and operational planning.