Jinko to Power 1 GW Desert AI Data Center

Nikkei Asia reports the Jinko group, the parent of JinkoSolar, will supply electricity from its own solar plants to a proposed 1 gigawatt data center near Zhongwei in the Ningxia autonomous region. Per KR-Asia's reproduction of the coverage, the development is a RMB 24.5 billion (about USD 3.6 billion) project that will occupy roughly 530,000 square meters. Construction is reported to begin this year with a target completion by 2028, and the deal followed an agreement between local government authorities and Jinko Power Technology, a group subsidiary.

KR-Asia reports the project will include a dedicated power plant to supply the facility directly and that the arrangement is described in Chinese policy discussions as "computing power coordination," a model where generation and computing assets are co-located. The article cites an internal company disclosure that Jinko Power held RMB 5.8 billion in cash and deposits at the end of 2025, and states that banks such as China Construction Bank and CTBC Bank are reportedly considering financing. KR-Asia also reports the project is being explored as a joint-venture option with outside investors.

For practitioners: co-locating renewable generation and data centers is a growing architecture to absorb variable output from solar and wind and to reduce curtailment. Industry implementations typically require integrated power-electrical design, demand flexibility mechanisms, and contracts that align generation dispatch with server load. The KR-Asia coverage notes China is seeing rising solar curtailment, citing a calculation using data from the National Energy Administration that curtailment rose to 5% last year from 2% in 2020, which provides the economic rationale public reporting assigns to such projects.

Observed patterns in similar transitions: Chinese local governments and energy companies have increasingly pursued "watt-bit" or "computing power coordination" models to monetize stranded renewables and to anchor new industrial investment in underpopulated regions. For infrastructure planners and ML ops teams, these projects change the tradeoffs between grid-provided resilience and on-site generation, and they raise questions about latency, network connectivity, and cooling design when data centers are placed in desert locations.

Industry observers should track formal financing announcements (names and tranche sizes from banks reported as interested by KR-Asia), any joint-venture filings for the project, and provincial or national approvals tied to "computing power coordination" policy language. Also monitor data on curtailment from the National Energy Administration to gauge how compelling the operational case will be for similar generator-plus-compute projects.