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Rudong county in Nantong, Jiangsu province, has secured two major artificial intelligence computing projects in quick succession — a 30 billion yuan ($4.45 billion) investment from China Telecom and an over 5 billion yuan commitment from VNET Group — together exceeding 35 billion yuan.

China Telecom chose Rudong's Yangkou Port Economic Development Zone for its Yangtze River Delta green AI computing cluster, while VNET plans a green computing (Token Factory) project with at least 200 megawatts of information technology load in the county.

The county hosts Asia's largest offshore wind farm cluster for a county-level region, with 5.62 gigawatts of wind power and 2.65 GW of solar capacity, generating over 15 billion kilowatt-hours annually.

An offshore wind farm in Rudong. [Photo/WeChat account: rudongfb]

Yangkou Port operates China's largest offshore hub for liquified natural gas, with three terminals handling over 7 million metric tons per year. The figure is set to exceed 20 million tons by 2030. LNG cold energy is being utilized to cool data centers, which can result in savings of hundreds of millions of kWh of electricity each year.

In addition to power, Rudong is building a cold energy exchange center at Yangkou Port. This facility will directly supply cooling to computing facilities, saving an estimated 130 million kWh of electricity and cutting carbon emissions by 100,000 tons each year.

The county is now in discussions with GDS, China Mobile, JD and Envision Energy to explore additional green computing projects.