China’s Hectic AI Rollout Has Left Data Centers Idling

China's plunge into AI has created a huge amount of excess data center capacity.

According to investigations by Chinese media, data center players have built too much capacity, lack the skills to carry out complex AI processes, and have overestimated demand.

China is planning to establish 50 intelligent computing centers by 2025, increasing its computing capacity by a third over four years – although according to one estimate, 70 new centers are already under construction.

In contrast to CPU-based legacy data centers, AI data centers integrate GPU and other types of chips for simultaneous processing of huge workloads. They consume as much as four times the energy of traditional data centers.

A report by AI Technology Review late last year complained the market had "blindly advanced" data center construction and had over-estimated demand, resulting in idle servers and in some cases the closure of intelligent computing centers.

It estimated an intelligent data center with 1,250 servers supporting large model training and inference could cost up to 1 billion Chinese yuan (US$141 million) a year to run, mostly in power costs and depreciation.

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