China is preparing to spend around 2 trillion yuan over the next five years on building data centres across the country, with key government agencies including the National Development and Reform Commission drafting a blueprint to erect a network of interconnected computing hubs.
State firms including China Mobile and China Telecom will operate the bulk of the data centres and ensure they are connected, placing two of the world’s largest telecoms operators at the centre of the country’s AI infrastructure strategy.
The plan represents a significant expansion of the carriers’ role beyond connectivity and into the provision of sovereign compute at national scale.
The technology sourcing strategy is as significant as the investment figure. The plan is designed to rely on local suppliers including Huawei for at least 80% of technology such as AI chips, effectively squeezing out Nvidia and AMD.
That threshold would mark a decisive shift away from Western silicon in Chinese state infrastructure, accelerating a decoupling that US export controls have been pushing in the same direction from the other side.
The investment goal is laid out within China’s latest five-year plan covering the period through 2030, in which Beijing pledged to prioritise the construction of data infrastructure. The two trillion yuan figure does not include spending by private firms such as Alibaba and Tencent, whose own AI capital expenditure programmes run separately alongside the state-directed plan.
The scale of the commitment nonetheless sits in a different bracket to US private sector spending. The $295 billion five-year total compares to the $725 billion that US companies including Meta and Microsoft are setting aside for AI investment in 2026 alone.
Chinese data centres generally cost less to build and operate than their US equivalents, however, due to lower labour, component and construction costs and local government incentives.
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