Jinko to Power 1 GW Desert AI Data Center

Jinko Power, a subsidiary of the Jinko solar group, has signed a framework investment agreement with the Zhongwei municipal government to develop a 1 gigawatt data center in the Ningxia region of western China, supplying electricity directly from its own solar plants (Nikkei Asia; pv magazine). Reporting puts planned investment at about RMB 24.5 billion (around USD 3.6 billion), with the facility covering roughly 534,000 square meters and designed for about 50,000 standard racks built in three phases (Yicai Global; pv magazine). The move marks the world's largest solar-panel maker's entry into the data-center, or green computing, business as AI drives power demand.

Multiple outlets stress the arrangement is a framework agreement that remains preliminary and subject to multiple approvals and funding scrutiny; the final project size, investment plan, and implementation path may change materially, or the project could be terminated (pv magazine; Yicai Global).

Industry pattern: co-locating renewable generation with data centers is a growing architecture to absorb variable solar and wind output and reduce curtailment. Such implementations typically require integrated power-electrical design, demand-flexibility mechanisms, and contracts that align generation dispatch with server load. China has seen rising solar curtailment in recent years, part of the economic rationale that reporting assigns to projects pairing generation with on-site compute.

The project fits China's national 'Eastern Data, Western Computing' initiative, which steers compute capacity toward western regions with abundant energy and land. Chinese local governments and energy firms have increasingly pursued such compute-power coordination models to monetize stranded renewables and anchor industrial investment in underpopulated areas. For infrastructure planners and ML-ops teams, these projects shift trade-offs between grid-provided resilience and on-site generation and raise questions about latency, network backhaul, and cooling in desert locations.

Industry observers should track formal financing announcements and tranche sizes, any joint-venture filings, and provincial or national approvals tied to the project. Progress from a framework agreement to a funded, permitted build will be the key signal of whether the generator-plus-compute model scales.