What Huawei’s Horinger data center reveals about China’s compute gap

China is building many AI data center campuses with hundreds of megawatts of capacity, drawing on the country’s abundant energy resources. Huawei is one of the leaders in this effort, developing both AI chips and the data centers to run them. However, Huawei makes far fewer chips than Nvidia, and its best chips are less energy-efficient than Nvidia’s, which are export-controlled by the US. These constraints limit the computing power that Chinese data centers can deploy. Huawei’s AI data center in Horinger, Inner Mongolia is an informative case study. Despite being one of the largest data centers in China by AI computing capacity, it has less than one-tenth the capacity of the world’s largest AI data center, Colossus 2 in Tennessee. This report examines the Horinger facility and Huawei’s broader AI infrastructure plans using satellite imagery and public sources, and explains how this data center falls short of the global frontier. Huawei’s recent deployments are a good starting point for understanding its plans for AI infrastructure. Throughout 2025, Huawei chose several data center sites across China to deploy its Ascend 910C, the most capable domestic AI chip to be produced in large volumes that year. We have identified four sites…