China’s brightest energy problem

In 2023, renewable energy supplied 11 per cent of the electricity consumed by China’s data centres. Beijing wants that share to be four fifths by 2030. Over the same window, power demand from data centres is projected to grow by 300 to 500 billion kilowatthours, roughly 18 per cent of all electricity demand growth in China. The lower bound of that range equals the United Kingdom’s entire annual consumption. China has wagered that artificial intelligence (AI) will run on wind and sunlight.

The maths is simple. China’s surplus electron is a green one. In the first half of 2026, an estimated 360 terawatt-hours of wind and solar power was curtailed, up 49 per cent year on year. That wasted energy exceeded the entire 258 terawatt-hour growth in national power demand over the period. In July 2026, solar overtook coal as China’s largest source of installed capacity. Officially, 8.6 per cent of solar output and 9.1 per cent of wind output was curtailed in the first half. The weather-adjusted estimate is 26.1 per cent. The National Energy Administration stopped publishing monthly provincial curtailment data in March 2026, which is its own kind of admission.

Where power is stranded, computers will migrate. That is the logic of the East Data West Computing initiative, which steers data centres towards Gansu, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia, where curtailment runs at 15 to 30 per cent, against under 3 per cent in Guangdong and Zhejiang. In May 2026, a 500 megawatt wind and solar project in Ningxia began feeding a China Datang data centre through a dedicated line, the country’s first at scale. Wood Mackenzie projects data centre consumption quadrupling to 774 terawatt-hours by 2030 and describes the model plainly as compute following power. The United States, by contrast, has chips and lacks electrons. At least 36 American data centre projects were blocked or stalled between May 2024 and June 2025, and rising power bills have become a midterm election issue. One country is short of silicon, the other of supply. Each is sprinting to fix its own bottleneck.