Alibaba Zhangbei
Operational; Alibaba is recorded as owning the AI hardware inside this site
Description quoted from Epoch AI Frontier Data Centers
Alibaba Zhangbei spans three adjacent sites, built from 2016 to 2025. It is part of China's "Eastern Data Western Compute" (东数西算) project launched in 2021. Zhangbei county is favorable for this project due to its abundant wind and solar power. We only track the power capacity added here since 2024, which is higher-density and more likely for AI workloads. The power capacity is based on the air-cooled chillers seen in satellite images. Compute capacity is mostly calculated from power, based on the estimated energy efficiency of leading hardware available in China.
Source: Epoch AI Frontier Data Centers, CC BY 4.0
Date in site records: Jan 3, 2026. Site data: Epoch AI Frontier Data Centers.
Ownership and operation
AI hardware owner · per catalog Alibaba. Epoch AI's field for who owns the AI hardware, which it defines as not necessarily the owner or operator of the facility. source
Export controls and government links
No export-control designations were found in the checked company chains.
Headquarters jurisdiction
A company in the ownership chain is headquartered in China
China: Not a Wassenaar participant; operates its own Export Control Law (2020) and Unreliable Entity List; MOFCOM and the Ministry of Commerce administer dual-use catalogues. Export-control regimes listed for this jurisdiction: Chinese Export Control Law (2020), MOFCOM Unreliable Entity List authority.
Capacity
Facility power
Estimated.
Power for IT equipment
Estimated.
Accelerators
An estimated 31,884 H100-equivalent.
Power comparison
203 MW is at the 92nd percentile among the 310 operating AI Training records with a reported power figure. These represent 84% of the 369 operating AI Training records tracked; announced, under-construction and campus build-out figures are not ranked. The scale ends at the largest operating figure in this group, 1,276 MW.
Methods and sources
Ownership roles
Title identifies the legal owner of the site; operation identifies who runs it. AI-hardware ownership follows the catalog’s attribution of the machines inside, whose owner may lease the facility.
Each role requires its own attribution. An operator named in a source supplies evidence of operation only.
Parent companies
Ownership checks start with each company named at the site and follow recorded parent relationships. A company holding several roles is checked once. Its linked company page lists the relationships and their sources; further parents may remain undocumented.
Level 1 identifies a company at the site, level 2 its parent, and each further level another parent. Export-control designations and government investments are assigned to the company concerned.
Missing values
Unrecorded roles remain blank. Findings whose company position is unresolved stay in the list with that position labelled unknown.
Publication limits
Subscription corporate data helps identify parent relationships and sovereign investments. Publication is limited to relationship classes and supporting public sources; licensed records, identifiers and values are withheld.
Epoch AI estimates capacity using satellite imagery, permits and corporate disclosures. Its catalog is the source for this site record.
Related analysis
- Alibaba Zhangbei on the global mapOpens the map at this site’s pin, among the facilities around it.
- Alibaba Zhangbei in the threshold comparisonEach listed site’s estimated compute against regulatory training thresholds, or the reason no estimate is admitted.
- US–China Full Decouple: Access DenialAlibaba seeds this cascade scenario; the simulator opens with it selected.
- Allied coordination: Non-coordinated jurisdiction in chainThe Allied Coordination Gap Analyzer lists this site under that class of ownership chain.
- China country profileFacility capacity, government programmes and export-control access for the country this site is in.
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