ByteDance Ulanqab Data Center
Core AI recommendation and Douyin video backbone on the Inner Mongolian steppe
The story
Situated on the windy steppes of Ulanqab, known as China's 'Grassland Cloud Valley', ByteDance's mega-data center is the computational engine behind Douyin and TikTok's machine learning recommendation models. Surrounded by vast wind farms on the Mongolian plateau, the facility operates with free-air economizers for most of the year. The site has evolved into a premier high-density AI training factory hosting large-scale liquid-cooled GPU racks.
Notable
- Located in Ulanqab ('Grassland Cloud Valley'), benefiting from an annual mean temperature of 4.3°C.
- Houses massive AI compute farms powering Douyin, TikTok, and Volcano Engine cloud models.
- Deployed advanced indirect evaporative cooling units to achieve PUE below 1.15.
- Operates under multi-hundred-megawatt wind power supply contracts on the Mengxi grid.
Expansions
- 2021: Phase 1 commissioned for Douyin video streaming and recommendation algorithms
- 2023: upgraded with liquid-cooled GPU clusters powering Doubao LLM foundation models
Sources
- 乌兰察布市加快打造草原云谷大数据产业基地 · Ulanqab Municipal Government · 2022-04-18
- 火山引擎绿色数据中心基础设施实践 · Volcano Engine (ByteDance) · 2023-05-10
Part of the open famous data centers dataset (CC BY 4.0). Updated 2026-10-15. A correction? da@mustardseedmt.com
What is ByteDance Ulanqab Data Center famous for?
Core AI recommendation and Douyin video backbone on the Inner Mongolian steppe
Where is ByteDance Ulanqab Data Center?
ByteDance Ulanqab Data Center is in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, China (41.018, 113.125). It is operated by ByteDance.
How much power does ByteDance Ulanqab Data Center use?
About 80 MW of IT load and 95 MW in total, according to the sources listed on this page.
What is the PUE of ByteDance Ulanqab Data Center?
1.14, reported.