Research institute Epoch AI published a report on 6 November about Huawei’s AI data centre in Horinger, Inner Mongolia. Ben Cottier, the Epoch researcher who wrote the report, compares the campus with SpaceX’s Colossus 2 in Tennessee. Epoch regards Colossus 2 as the world’s largest AI data centre and estimates that it has about 14 times as much computing capacity.

The unit of comparison is the H100-equivalent: a chip’s theoretical peak computing speed at 8-bit precision relative to Nvidia’s H100 chip. Huawei’s Ascend 910C equals about 0.76 H100s. Epoch said the metric does not capture every property that matters for training and inference.

The estimate rests on rooftop cooling equipment

Epoch estimated the buildings’ power capacity from satellite images. The type, size and number of cooling units indicate how much heat a building can remove, and hence its IT power. Epoch’s model puts the IT power of the four densely cooled buildings at 286 megawatts in total. From the substations Epoch inferred 304 megawatts, and from the backup generators 230 megawatts. Three buildings are in operation, Epoch said, and the fourth is expected to come online in December.

For rack occupancy, Epoch assumed the roughly 76 per cent reported for the Horinger area as a whole. It inferred the chip mix from estimates of Huawei’s sales. The result was about 105,000 Ascend 910C and 8,000 Ascend 910B chips, or about 81,000 H100-equivalents (90 per cent confidence interval 36,000–141,000). The calculation assumes the campus has no export-restricted Nvidia chips. Epoch considers their use possible but unlikely. The figures are Epoch’s estimates, not figures disclosed by Huawei.

Of the Chinese data centres Epoch examined, only VNET’s Bayin Ulanqab and Huawei’s Wuhu are likely to be as large or slightly larger. A campus’s computing capacity cannot necessarily be pooled to train a single model, however, because it is often split into separate clusters. By Epoch’s calculation, just a tenth of the campus’s capacity could train a model the size of DeepSeek-V4-Pro in a month.

Chips, not power, are the constraint

Nvidia’s B200 and B300 chips are about 2.5 times more energy-efficient than the Ascend 910C, Epoch said. As a result, the same power capacity in China yields only 40 per cent of the computing capacity of leading US data centres. Huawei also makes far fewer chips than Nvidia.

A new building is going up in the campus’s southern zone, and Epoch estimates it will be operational in February 2028. If it is as AI-focused as the existing buildings, the campus’s computing capacity would grow by more than 70 per cent to about 141,000 H100-equivalents (confidence interval 65,000–227,000). The growth would come from added power capacity: Epoch said Huawei’s next-generation Ascend 950 appears to be less energy-efficient than the 910C.

Epoch expects Colossus 2 to grow to at least 1.8 million H100-equivalents by 2028. FourWeekMBA, which summarised the report, calculated a roughly 12.8-fold gap from these figures. The Colossus 2 figure is a lower bound, however, because satellite images show two more buildings under construction, Epoch said. Epoch itself estimates that Horinger’s share will stay roughly the same or shrink.