China signs $27B of AI projects in Hohhot, breaks ground on a free-trade-zone platform for cross-border compute

China signed 12 AI projects in Hohhot worth 186.46 billion yuan (about $27.49 billion) in planned investment, and broke ground on a free-trade-zone platform whose real job is plumbing: turning domestic compute into a schedulable, metered, and FX-clearable service for foreign developers.

The 2026 Green Computing Power (AI) Conference produced commitments from Volcano Engine (ByteDance's cloud unit), Cambricon Technologies, and China Telecom, covering green data centers, "token factories" (facilities optimized to bill and serve AI model output), and computing-power equipment manufacturing. All twelve are in the announced or pre-construction stage, not operating.

Construction also officially began on a new digital-services platform inside the Hohhot area of the China (Inner Mongolia) Pilot Free Trade Zone. It will offer five named services to overseas developers: compliance assessment, computing-power scheduling, token measurement, cross-border settlement, and developer support.

The supply side is Inner Mongolia's wind- and solar-powered capacity. Horinger New Area has 62 computing centers totaling 150,000 PFlops (a measure of AI-grade compute speed, where higher means more powerful), with 143,000 PFlops of intelligent compute; neighboring Ulanqab runs 172,000 PFlops operational, more than 95% intelligent, per local authorities at the conference.

No foreign customers, developers, or counterparties are named. The platform is not yet operating, and the planned investment is signed, not deployed.