Most of the quarter's RMB728.8 billion is commitments not yet built, so suppliers of servers, power and cooling face orders that land over coming years rather than now.
Projects to build intelligent computing centers in China carried about RMB728.8 billion in investment in the third quarter of 2026, up 34.4% from RMB542.4 billion a year earlier, according to CINNO Research data reported by Zhitong Finance on October 14. Most of that money has not yet turned into capacity. Of the 62 projects counted in the quarter, RMB521.7 billion, or 71.6% of the total value, sat at the proposed or preparation stage. Only about RMB99.36 billion, 13.6%, was at the delivery or operation stage.
The figures resurfaced on November 11 in a TechNode analysis by Jessie Wu, which set China’s buildout against growing local resistance to data centers in Europe and the United States. The CINNO figures cover the third quarter alone, and the stage shares refer to investment value.
The split matters for anyone selling into the buildout. Commitments at the planning stage translate into server, power and cooling orders over the following years, and TechNode suggests 2027 could be a major delivery year. The remaining stages are smaller: about RMB91.74 billion, or 12.6%, was under construction, and about RMB16 billion, or 2.2%, had been topped out or completed.
Capacity is large and the pipeline keeps growing
China’s installed base is already substantial. An Economic Daily report republished by the Digital China Summit on October 8 said China had 15.56 million standard racks in use as of June 2026 and more than 2,000 EB of storage, figures from the 2026 Comprehensive Computing Power Panorama Analysis (2026综合算力全景分析) released at the China Computing Power Conference. The same report put intelligent computing capacity at 2,185 EFLOPS at the end of June, up 177% year on year. EastFrontier has reported that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s plan sets a 9,800-EFLOPS target for 2030.
Cailian Press carried the CINNO figures on October 16 alongside a Huaxi Securities view that domestic demand for computing remains strong. The brokerage described supply as tight at the high end and loose at the low end, an imbalance it expects to persist in the short term. CINNO’s release also describes a regional split: northern hubs led by Hohhot and Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia lean on clean power, while southern hubs such as Shaoguan and Guangzhou emphasize domestic chips and liquid cooling.
Telecom operators win the biggest contracts
Tender data show who is placing the orders. A count by Shuzhi Qianxian, published on TMTPost on August 10, found at least 158 data center and intelligent computing projects with winning bids above RMB100 million in the first seven months of 2026, worth more than RMB113 billion combined. Both the number and the value rose more than 18% from a year earlier. The count drew on government procurement and tender platforms and was described as incomplete, so the totals are a floor.
Telecom operators accounted for more than half of China’s data center contracts worth over RMB100 million in the first seven months of 2026. Their deals topped RMB55 billion. China Mobile’s server procurement came to about RMB17.7 billion and China Telecom’s high-performance server procurement to about RMB11.5 billion. The single largest project was an engineering contract of about RMB16.2 billion for an AI industry cluster in Hainan Prefecture (海南州), planned at 40,000P of computing. Zhongwei in Ningxia led cities with 18 projects, followed by Hohhot with 11 and Shaoguan with 10.
Ulanqab shows how concentrated the build can become. Science and Technology Daily reported on August 20 that more than 100 data center projects had landed in the city, with 172,000P of computing in operation, up 112% year on year, and intelligent computing above 95% of it.
Western resistance gives the buildout a different backdrop
TechNode contrasts this with the West, where rising electricity costs and community opposition have stalled some projects since the second half of 2026. In Ireland, data centers used 23% of metered electricity in 2025, up from 22% a year earlier, the Irish Examiner reported from Central Statistics Office data. TechNode also cited a Nordea estimate that Finland’s wholesale power prices could rise about 31% by 2030 at the current pace of construction.
China channels its buildout through the Eastern Data, Western Computing (东数西算) program launched in 2022, with eight national hub nodes and 10 data center clusters, TechNode noted. That planning does not remove the delivery risk visible in the CINNO data. The figure to watch is CINNO’s fourth-quarter release: a falling planning share and a rising operation share would show the RMB521.7 billion of proposed projects turning into working capacity.