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The Material Geography of Chinese AI

Companies, compute, and power: mapping the material foundations of Chinese AI.

China’s AI industry is concentrated along the eastern seaboard, especially around Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen. The electricity, cold air, and cheap land that computation needs are often found much farther inland. 东数西算 is the state’s attempt to close that gap by moving computation instead of people.

Sep 2026·Interactive essay
A section of Wang Ximeng's blue-green landscape scroll: mountains, water and a long bridge

I built these maps mostly so I could keep track of all this myself, and to learn China geopolitics. They are three layers of one system, not three separate charts: the firms sit on the compute, and the compute sits on the grid.

01 · Companies

The industry, by headquarters

104 companies across 19 cities. One dab per company, coloured by where it sits in the stack and sized by how big the company is. Hover a dab to read it, click it for the profile; use the key to isolate a layer.

Anhui · 安徽省Beijing · 北京市Chongqing · 重庆市Fujian · 福建省Guangdong · 广东省Gansu · 甘肃省Guangxi · 广西壮族自治区Guizhou · 贵州省Henan · 河南省Hubei · 湖北省Hebei · 河北省Hainan · 海南省Hong Kong · 香港特別行政區Heilongjiang · 黑龙江省Hunan · 湖南省Jilin · 吉林省Jiangsu · 江苏省Jiangxi · 江西省Liaoning · 辽宁省Macau · 澳門特別行政區Inner Mongolia · 内蒙古自治区Ningxia · 宁夏回族自治区Qinghai · 青海省Sichuan · 四川省Shandong · 山东省Shanghai · 上海市Shaanxi · 陕西省Shanxi · 山西省Tianjin · 天津市Xinjiang · 新疆维吾尔自治区Tibet · 西藏自治区Yunnan · 云南省Zhejiang · 浙江省 Baidu · 百度 — Platform, Beijing ByteDance · 字节跳动 — Platform, Beijing JD.com · 京东 — Platform, Beijing Meituan · 美团 — Platform, Beijing Lenovo · 联想 — Machines, Beijing Xiaomi · 小米 — Machines, Beijing Didi · 滴滴出行 — Platform, Beijing Kingsoft · 金山软件 — Platform, Beijing Kuaishou · 快手 — Platform, Beijing Weibo · 微博 — Platform, Beijing Moonshot AI · 月之暗面 — Model lab, Beijing Zhipu AI · 智谱 — Model lab, Beijing Cambricon · 寒武纪 — Silicon, Beijing GigaDevice · 兆易创新 — Silicon, Beijing Horizon Robotics · 地平线 — Silicon, Beijing Hygon · 海光信息 — Silicon, Beijing Loongson · 龙芯中科 — Silicon, Beijing Moore Threads · 摩尔线程 — Silicon, Beijing NAURA · 北方华创 — Silicon, Beijing Kunlun Tech · 昆仑万维 — Applied, Beijing Qihoo 360 · 奇虎360 — Applied, Beijing Li Auto · 理想汽车 — Machines, Beijing Roborock · 石头科技 — Machines, Beijing Zhihu · 知乎 — Platform, Beijing 01.AI · 零一万物 — Model lab, Beijing BAAI · 北京智源人工智能研究院 — Model lab, Beijing Baichuan Intelligence · 百川智能 — Model lab, Beijing Langboat · 澜舟科技 — Model lab, Beijing ModelBest · 面壁智能 — Model lab, Beijing 4Paradigm · 第四范式 — Applied, Beijing Aibee · 爱笔智能 — Applied, Beijing Megvii · 旷视科技 — Applied, Beijing AUBO Robotics · 遨博智能 — Machines, Beijing Galbot · 银河通用 — Machines, Beijing PDD Holdings · 拼多多 — Platform, Shanghai SMIC · 中芯国际 — Silicon, Shanghai SAIC Motor · 上汽集团 — Machines, Shanghai Bilibili · 哔哩哔哩 — Platform, Shanghai Trip.com Group · 携程 — Platform, Shanghai MiniMax · 稀宇科技 — Model lab, Shanghai AMEC · 中微公司 — Silicon, Shanghai Hua Hong Semiconductor · 华虹半导体 — Silicon, Shanghai MetaX · 沐曦 — Silicon, Shanghai UNISOC · 紫光展锐 — Silicon, Shanghai Hesai · 禾赛科技 — Applied, Shanghai SenseTime · 商汤科技 — Applied, Shanghai NIO · 蔚来 — Machines, Shanghai Shanghai AI Laboratory · 上海人工智能实验室 — Model lab, Shanghai StepFun · 阶跃星辰 — Model lab, Shanghai ACM Research · 盛美上海 — Silicon, Shanghai Biren Technology · 壁仞科技 — Silicon, Shanghai Enflame · 燧原科技 — Silicon, Shanghai Zhaoxin · 兆芯 — Silicon, Shanghai Yitu · 依图科技 — Applied, Shanghai AgiBot · 智元机器人 — Machines, Shanghai Fourier Intelligence · 傅利叶智能 — Machines, Shanghai Huawei · 华为 — Platform, Shenzhen Tencent · 腾讯 — Platform, Shenzhen BYD · 比亚迪 — Machines, Shenzhen ZTE · 中兴通讯 — Platform, Shenzhen HiSilicon · 海思半导体 — Silicon, Shenzhen Mindray · 迈瑞医疗 — Applied, Shenzhen Ping An Technology · 平安科技 — Applied, Shenzhen RoboSense · 速腾聚创 — Applied, Shenzhen DJI · 大疆创新 — Machines, Shenzhen Inovance · 汇川技术 — Machines, Shenzhen UBTech · 优必选 — Machines, Shenzhen Dobot · 越疆 — Machines, Shenzhen Alibaba · 阿里巴巴 — Platform, Hangzhou Ant Group · 蚂蚁集团 — Platform, Hangzhou Geely · 吉利汽车 — Machines, Hangzhou Alibaba Cloud · 阿里云 — Platform, Hangzhou Cainiao · 菜鸟 — Platform, Hangzhou DingTalk · 钉钉 — Platform, Hangzhou NetEase · 网易 — Platform, Hangzhou Dahua Technology · 大华股份 — Applied, Hangzhou Hikvision · 海康威视 — Applied, Hangzhou Leapmotor · 零跑汽车 — Machines, Hangzhou Unitree Robotics · 宇树科技 — Machines, Hangzhou Zeekr · 极氪 — Machines, Hangzhou Game Science · 游戏科学 — Platform, Hangzhou DeepSeek · 深度求索 — Model lab, Hangzhou Manycore Tech · 群核科技 — Applied, Hangzhou BrainCo · 强脑科技 — Machines, Hangzhou Deep Robotics · 云深处科技 — Machines, Hangzhou Shein · 希音 — Platform, Guangzhou XPeng · 小鹏汽车 — Machines, Guangzhou CloudWalk · 云从科技 — Applied, Guangzhou CXMT · 长鑫存储 — Silicon, Hefei iFlytek · 科大讯飞 — Applied, Hefei Gotion High-Tech · 国轩高科 — Machines, Hefei YMTC · 长江存储 — Silicon, Wuhan Estun · 埃斯顿 — Machines, Nanjing Ecovacs · 科沃斯 — Machines, Suzhou Inspur · 浪潮 — Platform, Jinan Siasun · 新松机器人 — Machines, Shenyang Jingjia Micro · 景嘉微 — Silicon, Changsha Changan Automobile · 长安汽车 — Machines, Chongqing Rockchip · 瑞芯微 — Silicon, Fuzhou CATL · 宁德时代 — Machines, Ningde Midea · 美的集团 — Machines, Foshan EVE Energy · 亿纬锂能 — Machines, Huizhou Allwinner Technology · 全志科技 — Silicon, Zhuhai Meitu · 美图 — Applied, Xiamen

Industry layer

Company size

  • Giant
  • Large
  • Start-up

Company geography

Explore the companies behind China's AI stack

Select a company on the map for its profile, or isolate one layer of the industry with the key in the corner of the map.

The pattern to notice

Every company in this dataset is headquartered on the eastern side of the Hu Huanyong line of 1935, the side where roughly 94% of China's population lives on well under half the land. That crowding is why Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are drawn beside their true positions, with the small ring at the end of the leader line marking where each one actually sits.

Every company on that map sits east of the Hu Huanyong line. That is where the trouble starts. Training and serving models takes data centres that draw power around the clock and need land and cooling, and the eastern cities are where all three are scarcest. Beijing has been closed to new large data centres for years. A handful of the platforms already compute far from home.

Open one of them on the map to see where. The next map is the state’s attempt to make that the rule rather than the exception.

02 · Compute

East Data, West Computing · 东数西算

8 national computing hub nodes and the 10 data centre clusters inside them, approved in February 2022. Four hubs hold the demand; four hold the power, the cold air and the land.

8 hub nodes10 data centre clusters4 · 4 demand and supply

Anhui · 安徽省 — Yangtze River Delta hub Beijing · 北京市 — Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei hub Chongqing · 重庆市 — Chengdu–Chongqing hub Fujian · 福建省 Guangdong · 广东省 — Greater Bay Area hub Gansu · 甘肃省 — Gansu hub Guangxi · 广西壮族自治区 Guizhou · 贵州省 — Guizhou hub Henan · 河南省 Hubei · 湖北省 Hebei · 河北省 — Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei hub Hainan · 海南省 Hong Kong · 香港特別行政區 — Greater Bay Area hub Heilongjiang · 黑龙江省 Hunan · 湖南省 Jilin · 吉林省 Jiangsu · 江苏省 — Yangtze River Delta hub Jiangxi · 江西省 Liaoning · 辽宁省 Macau · 澳門特別行政區 — Greater Bay Area hub Inner Mongolia · 内蒙古自治区 — Inner Mongolia hub Ningxia · 宁夏回族自治区 — Ningxia hub Qinghai · 青海省 Sichuan · 四川省 — Chengdu–Chongqing hub Shandong · 山东省 Shanghai · 上海市 — Yangtze River Delta hub Shaanxi · 陕西省 Shanxi · 山西省 Tianjin · 天津市 — Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei hub Xinjiang · 新疆维吾尔自治区 Tibet · 西藏自治区 Yunnan · 云南省 Zhejiang · 浙江省 — Yangtze River Delta hub Zhangjiakou Zhangjiakou · 张家口 — Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei hub Delta Zone Yangtze Delta Demonstration Zone · 长三角生态绿色一体化发展示范区 — Yangtze River Delta hub Wuhu Wuhu · 芜湖 — Yangtze River Delta hub Shaoguan Shaoguan · 韶关 — Greater Bay Area hub Tianfu Tianfu · 天府 — Chengdu–Chongqing hub Chongqing Chongqing · 重庆 — Chengdu–Chongqing hub Horinger Horinger · 和林格尔 — Inner Mongolia hub Gui'an Gui'an · 贵安 — Guizhou hub Qingyang Qingyang · 庆阳 — Gansu hub Zhongwei Zhongwei · 中卫 — Ningxia hub
  • Demand hub · where the data is
  • Supply hub · cheap power and land
  • Eastern city · where the work starts

How to use it

  1. Follow a line from its ring, an eastern city, to the diamond meant to take its work.
  2. Hover a diamond to light up its hub and the line into it.

Demand hubs

Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei 京津冀

The research capital and its overflow. Beijing itself has been closed to new large data centres for years, so the capacity moved to the hills north-west of it.

  • Zhangjiakou 张家口About 200 km from Beijing, cold most of the year, and sitting inside one of the country's oldest wind-power bases. Alibaba's northern cloud region is next door at Zhangbei.
Yangtze River Delta 长三角

The densest concentration of demand in the country: Shanghai's finance and silicon, Hangzhou's platforms, and the manufacturing belt between them.

  • Yangtze Delta Demonstration Zone 长三角生态绿色一体化发展示范区Straddles the Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang borders on purpose — a cross-jurisdiction zone built so latency-sensitive workloads can stay close to the city without sitting inside it.
  • Wuhu 芜湖The delta's cheaper hinterland, roughly 300 km up the Yangtze from Shanghai. Huawei, China Telecom and Alibaba campuses.
Greater Bay Area 粤港澳大湾区

Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau as one labour market. Hardware demand, and the most land-constrained of the four demand hubs.

  • Shaoguan 韶关The delta's designated relief valve: far enough north of Guangzhou for land and power to be affordable, close enough for round-trip latency to stay tolerable.
Chengdu–Chongqing 成渝

The interior's own megacity pair, and the reason the map is not a clean east-west split. Sichuan hydropower makes it a supply region too, and the cleanest grid in the country at roughly 265 g CO₂ per kWh — in the wet season. The 2022 drought shut factories for weeks.

  • Tianfu 天府Chengdu's new-area cluster, drawing on Sichuan hydropower that would otherwise be curtailed each summer.
  • Chongqing 重庆Paired with Tianfu across the Sichuan basin; automotive and industrial workloads rather than consumer platforms.

Supply hubs

Inner Mongolia 内蒙古

Cold, flat, windy, and already wired to the capital — the most built-out of the western hubs before the policy existed. Also the dirtiest grid in the country, at roughly 947 g CO₂ per kWh against Sichuan's 265. The wind is real; so is the coal underneath it.

  • Horinger 和林格尔South of Hohhot, where all three state carriers put their northern bases. Alibaba, Huawei and Apple's second China data centre are a little further east at Ulanqab.
Guizhou 贵州

The original experiment. Mild year-round temperatures, hydropower, stable karst geology, and a decade of provincial policy aimed at exactly this. The one supply hub where the clean-power argument mostly holds — though Guizhou is a coal province with hydro on top, not the reverse.

  • Gui'an 贵安Next to Guiyang, which already holds Apple's China iCloud data under its local partner, Tencent's tunnel data centre, and the three carriers' southern bases.
Gansu 甘肃

The newest of the four, and the most explicitly energy-led: built alongside the wind and solar bases of the Hexi Corridor. Whether a workload lands on that wind or on the coal beside it depends on the hour, not on the address.

  • Qingyang 庆阳On the Loess Plateau in eastern Gansu, developed with China Mobile alongside new renewable capacity rather than after it.
Ningxia 宁夏

Small, dry, sunny and cheap, with the shortest political distance between a provincial government and a signed land deal. Sunny is not the same as clean: Ningxia sits in the coal-heavy northern half of the grid, well above the national average carbon intensity.

  • Zhongwei 中卫Desert edge on the Yellow River. The AWS China (Ningxia) region operated by its local partner sits here, along with Meituan's own campus.

Not all work can travel

The arrows on that map run west, but a workload can only follow them if nobody is waiting on the answer.

Can move west
  • Training runs
  • Overnight batch jobs
  • Backups
  • Rendering
Has to stay near users
  • Models answering chat
  • Search queries
  • Payments
  • Games and video calls

That is why the plan did not send everything to the desert: half the hubs are demand hubs, and clusters like Wuhu and Shaoguan sit a few hundred kilometres from the cities they serve, near enough to answer quickly and far enough to find land.

It also means the programme suits training better than everyday use, because the more people use a model, the more of its computing has to happen near them. And even the work that can move west only helps if there is power to run it, power that already has somewhere to go.

03 · Power

West-to-East Power Transmission · 西电东送

The grid the compute policy is a footnote to. Three corridors carry electricity from where it is generated to the seven provinces that consume close to 40% of it — and they run the opposite way to the data.

Anhui · 安徽省 — State GridBeijing · 北京市 — State GridChongqing · 重庆市 — State GridFujian · 福建省 — State GridGuangdong · 广东省 — Southern GridGansu · 甘肃省 — State GridGuangxi · 广西壮族自治区 — Southern GridGuizhou · 贵州省 — Southern GridHenan · 河南省 — State GridHubei · 湖北省 — State GridHebei · 河北省 — State GridHainan · 海南省 — Southern GridHong Kong · 香港特別行政區 — Southern GridHeilongjiang · 黑龙江省 — State GridHunan · 湖南省 — State GridJilin · 吉林省 — State GridJiangsu · 江苏省 — State GridJiangxi · 江西省 — State GridLiaoning · 辽宁省 — State GridMacau · 澳門特別行政區 — Southern GridInner Mongolia · 内蒙古自治区 — State GridNingxia · 宁夏回族自治区 — State GridQinghai · 青海省 — State GridSichuan · 四川省 — State GridShandong · 山东省 — State GridShanghai · 上海市 — State GridShaanxi · 陕西省 — State GridShanxi · 山西省 — State GridTianjin · 天津市 — State GridXinjiang · 新疆维吾尔自治区 — State GridTibet · 西藏自治区 — State GridYunnan · 云南省 — Southern GridZhejiang · 浙江省 — State GridBeijing–Tianjin–Hebei and Shandong · 京津冀鲁Yangtze River Delta · 长三角Pearl River Delta · 珠三角Hami · 哈密 — Wind and solarJiuquan · 酒泉 — Wind and solarOrdos · 鄂尔多斯 — CoalYulin · 榆林 — CoalShanxi bases · 山西煤电基地 — CoalXilingol · 锡林郭勒 — Wind and solarBaihetan · 白鹤滩 — HydroXiangjiaba · 向家坝 — HydroThree Gorges · 三峡 — HydroNuozhadu · 糯扎渡 — HydroWudongde · 乌东德 — HydroBijie · 毕节 — Coal

Power source

HydroWind and solarCoal

Northern corridor 北通道

→ Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei and Shandong

Coal, wind and solar from the northern and north-western bases into the capital region. This is the corridor that overlaps East Data, West Computing most directly: three of the four supply hubs sit on it.

  • Hami 哈密Wind and solar
  • Jiuquan 酒泉Wind and solar
  • Ordos 鄂尔多斯Coal
  • Yulin 榆林Coal
  • Shanxi bases 山西煤电基地Coal
  • Xilingol 锡林郭勒Wind and solar
Central corridor 中通道

→ Yangtze River Delta

Yangtze hydropower into Shanghai and its neighbours. The oldest and least controversial leg, and the one where the resource is genuinely enormous.

  • Baihetan 白鹤滩Hydro
  • Xiangjiaba 向家坝Hydro
  • Three Gorges 三峡Hydro
Southern corridor 南通道

→ Pearl River Delta

Yunnan and Guizhou generation into Guangdong's factories. Run end to end by the Southern Grid, which was created to run it.

  • Nuozhadu 糯扎渡Hydro
  • Wudongde 乌东德Hydro
  • Bijie 毕节Coal

What the corridor map leaves out

Westward does not automatically mean cleaner.

Electricity can move west to east while its carbon burden moves in the opposite direction. China's computing policy sends workloads across a grid whose emissions vary by more than a factor of three.

Grid carbon intensityThree of the four supply hubs sit in the coal-heavy north, not the hydro south-west.

265 g CO₂ / kWh · Sichuan947 g CO₂ / kWh · Inner Mongolia

3.6× higher at the northern endpoint

Four limits to a clean-grid reading
  1. 01Hydro is seasonal. Sichuan and Yunnan are abundant in the wet season and tight in the dry one. The 2022 Sichuan drought shut factories and rationed power for weeks.
  2. 02“Hydro province” is too simple. Guizhou combines coal with hydro. That mixed system is part of why its power remains cheap and steady enough for data centres.
  3. 03Curtailment is no longer the whole case. It supported the original argument for building west, but fell sharply after 2017 as transmission expanded. Renewables growth is now pushing it upward again.
  4. 04A green origin does not guarantee green delivery. Several ultra-high-voltage links include a guaranteed coal share for stability. A line leaving a wind base is not a line carrying only wind.

The implicationMoving a workload from Shanghai to Horinger changes its geography. Without hourly generation and delivery data, it does not prove that the workload became cleaner.

The constraint no map shows

Land, power and cooling are the inputs a map can draw. The one that has mattered most since 2022 is the chips.

  1. United States export controls cut China’s access to the most advanced AI accelerators and to the equipment needed to make them.
  2. The controls are tightened.

A data centre in Gansu with cheap power still has to fill its racks, and what it can fill them with is a limited stock of imported chips or domestic ones: the accelerators from Huawei, Cambricon and the Shanghai start-ups on the first map, made by foundries such as SMIC working without the most advanced tools.

Sources and method

All three maps are drawn on the same projection and the same frame, from Natural Earth admin-1 land polygons, so they can be laid over one another. No maritime boundary of any kind is encoded in the source or in this rendering. The dashed diagonal on each is the Hu Huanyong line of 1935, east of which roughly 94% of China’s population lives on well under half the land.

The companies. Headquarters as registered, which is not always where the work happens. Founders are historical; the person running a company is not, and leadership here is current as of early 2026. Where a leader trained is recorded for 52 of the 104 companies; the rest are left blank rather than guessed.

Dab size is company size in three steps, not a continuous scale, because private valuations and listed market caps do not compare closely enough to plot as numbers. Giant (17) are the household platforms and national champions, with tens of billions of dollars in revenue or value. Large (56) are listed or late-stage firms of real scale. Start-up (31) covers young companies, research institutes and small caps. The steps are my own judgement, and they measure size, not influence: DeepSeek is a small dab.

The compute. The eight hubs and ten clusters are the ones approved in February 2022 by the National Development and Reform Commission, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Energy Administration. The arcs show the direction the programme is named after, not designated routes: no hub is formally paired with any other. Reading the programme against the Hu Huanyong line is an idea taken from ChinaTalk’s Eastern Data, Western Compute is Fake. Company data-centre locations are recorded only where the cluster notes name them, so a company without that line is unrecorded rather than without data centres.

The electricity. Corridor structure follows the Wilson Center’s mapping of the West–East Electricity Transfer project, and service territories are as published by the two operators. Named generation sites are the major bases on each corridor, not a complete list — there are now dozens of ultra-high-voltage links. Carbon-intensity figures come from provincial grid carbon-footprint work covering 2020–2022; because estimates vary between studies, only the two well-attested endpoints are quoted.