China Data Center Tracker

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OperationalUnder constructionPlannedSuspended

Larger circles = more capacity; small dots = capacity unknown; pale filled circles = operating, known only by full sizeOnly facility-level locations are plotted

Operational—

Under construction—

Planned—

Suspended—

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Legal entities

The organizations behind the infrastructure

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Entity	Type	Group	Roles	Provinces	Facilities

Media reporting

What is being reported about China’s data centers, newest first

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Published	Headline	Outlet	Data centers	Entities

Facilities tracked

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across all lifecycle phases

Source documents

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original source records

Evidence claims

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Legal entities

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resolved organizations

Top developers

No developer data available.

Source types

No source data available.

Methodology

Each facility in this tracker comes from published source documents: environmental filings, land transfer notices, construction tenders, company disclosures and licence registries. Claims link back to their original sources, so the evidence can be checked.

Lifecycle phase and evidence strength are shown separately. Where status is ahead of the evidence, the record is flagged. Operating data centers show operating capacity and planned projects show planned capacity: stated or worked out exactly where the sources allow, otherwise an estimate range from the evidence they give. An operating data center known only by its size when finished is labelled full size and never counted as operating capacity. Coordinates from Chinese map systems are converted to WGS-84 before plotting.

How to read the tracker

Phase is the broad category. Status is the more specific project stage. Evidence strength is a separate measure. A project can have a high evidence score while still being planned, and an operating record can still lack the evidence needed to support its status.

Lifecycle phases

Operational: Recorded as operating, including an operating campus with an expansion project. Check the evidence-supported flag before treating this as confirmed online capacity.Includes: Operating, Expansion
Under construction: Recorded as being built, but not yet classified as operating. Check the status warning and timeline to see what construction activity is actually documented.Includes: Under construction
Planned: A project identified before the construction stage. It may only be a lead, or it may already have filings, land, or procurement activity. It is not counted as online capacity.Includes: Candidate, Filed, Land acquired, Tendering
Suspended: A broad category for stalled, cancelled, stale (outdated), or rejected records. This label alone does not establish that a physical site has closed or that a project was permanently cancelled.Includes: Suspended

Project statuses, in plain English

These are recorded classifications, not guarantees of current conditions. Open a facility’s timeline to check the original source, its date, and any status warning.

CandidatePhase: Planned: An initial lead or mention, for example in news, a policy document, or a company announcement. It may not yet have a qualifying project filing or other supporting evidence.
FiledPhase: Planned: A project filing or energy-review record has been linked. This records an administrative step; it does not by itself establish that all approvals are complete or building work has started.
Land acquiredPhase: Planned: A land-transfer record has been matched to the project. Securing a site does not establish that a data center has been built on it.
TenderingPhase: Planned: Procurement is underway: bids are being sought, or a contract award has been recorded, for work such as engineering, construction, equipment, or power supply. A tender is an invitation for suppliers to bid. An award names the selected supplier. Neither alone proves that construction has started or the facility is operating.
Under constructionPhase: Under construction: Recorded as in the building stage. Supporting claim types include contract awards, environmental assessments, and equipment procurement. Read the linked document to see exactly what work it establishes; this status does not mean the facility is online.
OperatingPhase: Operational: Recorded as in service. To pass the tracker’s evidence check, an operating-list entry or qualifying company report must also state that the facility is operating or expanding. This is not a live measurement of uptime, customer use, or power consumption.
ExpansionPhase: Operational: A new phase or additional capacity associated with an operating campus. The campus is grouped as operational; the added buildings or capacity are not necessarily online yet. Check the source and capacity basis for the scope of the expansion.
SuspendedPhase: Suspended: Used for a project marked stalled, cancelled, or stale, and also for a record rejected on review. Rejection can be about the record rather than the real-world site. The label does not distinguish these reasons, so the label alone cannot tell you which one applies. There is no fixed age implied by “stale.”

Example: a facility marked Tendering with High confidence can be well documented as a procurement project. It is still in the Planned phase; the confidence label does not mean it is already operating.

Evidence scores & confidence

Evidence score: Points from distinct types of linked evidence. Each type contributes once, so ten tenders do not earn ten times the tender points. This is not a percentage, a probability, or a score out of 100; it can exceed 100.
How points are assigned: Operating-list evidence: 30 points. Filing, land transfer, environmental assessment, energy review, and contract award: 25 each. Tender, equipment procurement, and company report: 15 each. Licence and network presence: 10 each. Media and policy: 5 each. Directory: 0. The facility’s score breakdown shows which types contributed.
High / Medium / Low confidence: For a facility: High means 50 or more evidence points; Medium means 25–49; Low means fewer than 25. These bands describe the amount and mix of evidence, not construction progress or a guarantee that every claim is correct.
Confirmed operating: The record passes the tracker’s status-specific evidence check. For an operational record, a qualifying linked claim must also say the facility is operating or expanding. The headline count shows how many operational records pass, out of all records in that phase.
Status not fully backed: The recorded status has not passed that evidence check. Treat it as a classification needing verification, even if its overall evidence score is high.

Capacity

Capacity · MW: How much electrical power a data center can supply to its computer equipment, in megawatts (1 MW = 1,000 kW). It is the size the data center was built for, not how much power it is using right now. It leaves out the extra power used for cooling.
Operating capacity: The capacity of a data center that is running. Each operating data center shows only this figure. If the sources give only the data center’s full size when finished, that size is shown and the facility page says so.
Planned capacity: The capacity of a project that is planned or being built. Each planned project shows only this figure.
Where the numbers come from: A figure is shown only when a source states it or it can be worked out exactly. Chinese sources often count “standard racks”; the government defines one standard rack as 2.5 kW, so 20,000 standard racks = 50 MW. A source that gives racks with their power (for example 2,010 racks at 8 kW each) is multiplied out. For a few planned projects the source states only a total power figure, which may include cooling; it is shown as stated. The facility page shows the calculation and the source sentence.
≈ Estimates: When no source states the capacity exactly, we estimate a range from the evidence the sources do give, shown in italics as “≈ 20–60 MW”. The evidence can be a rack count without the power per rack, the approved yearly electricity use, the size of the grid connection, the number of servers or AI chips, the amount of AI computing power, or the building’s floor area. Each is converted with a range measured at data centers where both the evidence and the real capacity are known. For example, racks of unstated power have run 4–20 kW each at comparable sites built since 2022. The range is wide when the evidence is loose, and we don’t narrow it. The facility page shows the evidence, the calculation and the source sentence.
What we never use: Budgets and land area. They depend too much on land prices, buildings and equipment to say anything reliable about power.
— (unknown): No source gives anything we can size the data center from. Nothing is guessed from similar data centers. A dash means unknown, not zero.
China’s operating capacity: The official national figure: standard racks in use across China, reported at the annual China Computing Power Conference and by MIIT, times 2.5 kW (the official size of a standard rack). The province and national-hub breakdown uses official provincial and hub figures, each with its date and source. They come from different dates, so they don’t add up exactly to the national figure.
Data centers we track: The individual sites on the map and list. We are working to itemize enough of them, each with its own capacity, to account for the official total region by region. Until coverage is high, the sum of tracked sites is not shown, because it would understate China’s capacity.
How we check the method: Each way of working out capacity is tested against official energy reviews from Guangdong that state the answer. The standard-rack conversion matched exactly in every case. Full details are in the project’s capacity methodology document.
Facilities, claims & source documents: Facilities are tracked project or site records. A claim is a statement extracted from a document; one document can yield several claims. These totals describe the tracker’s dataset, not a complete census of every data center in China. “New claims · 30d” uses the claim’s event date, not the date it was imported.

Map symbols & location accuracy

Phase symbols: The legend uses solid black for operational, diagonal hatching for construction, an empty outline for planned, and gray for suspended. On the map, construction uses a lighter fill instead of hatching, and planned markers use dashed outlines.
Marker size: Larger circles mean more capacity. Sites with unknown capacity use a small dot. Sizes are capped so the biggest sites don’t cover the map; compare the numbers for exact differences.
Faint or dashed markers: Appearance also reflects location precision: approximate positions are fainter, district-level positions have dashed outlines, and city-level positions are the faintest with dotted outlines. A dashed or dotted marker is therefore not sufficient on its own to identify a planned project. Open the record to confirm its phase and location precision.
Exact / Building / Street / District / City: Exact means a pin confirmed on the building footprint; Building means a building, point-of-interest, or land-parcel match; Street means only a road, town, or village-level position; District means an area such as a county or development zone; City means only the prefecture is known and the marker sits at its representative point. Street, district and city positions are approximate, not confirmed building footprints.
Satellite view levels: Each satellite image is labelled with the precision of the map pin and scaled to match: a building-level view is about 1 km across; street-level about 2.5 km; district-level about 10 km; city-level about 30 km, centred on the city centre. A district or city view shows the area, not the facility: the data center’s site within it is not known, so no building in frame should be taken to be the data center. Province-level records have no satellite view.
Satellite image dates: Each satellite image is labelled with the day it was taken, not the day it was published: Esri World Imagery, where the images come from, can lag the ground by years. For planned and under-construction sites an image more than a year old is flagged, because construction since then will not show. Building- and street-level views also list every earlier image of the site with its date, from the Esri World Imagery Wayback archive, so the site can be followed over time. City-level views are usually a mosaic of many images and have no single date.
Province / Not located: These records do not have a sufficiently specific facility position to plot. They stay in the register without a map pin. An unplotted facility is not necessarily missing from the dataset.
Mapped count / On the map: “Mapped” counts the currently filtered facilities with plotted coordinates. “On the map” in the dataset figures means a stored WGS-84 latitude is available; it is not a guarantee of building-level accuracy. The filtered map and dataset-wide percentage have different scopes.
WGS-84 · GCJ-02 · BD-09: WGS-84 is the coordinate reference used on this map. Coordinates from Chinese mapping systems GCJ-02 and BD-09 are converted before plotting to reduce positional offsets. The conversion does not improve the underlying location’s precision.

Source documents

Filing / Land transfer: A filing records an administrative project submission. A land-transfer notice records a parcel transaction or land-use rights. They document different steps and do not by themselves prove construction or operation.
Tender / Award / Equipment procurement: A tender invites bids; an award identifies a selected contractor or supplier; equipment procurement records purchasing activity. Delivery, installation, construction, and commissioning are separate milestones.
EIA / Energy review: EIA means environmental impact assessment. An energy review examines energy use or efficiency and can state approved consumption limits. A proposal, assessment, or approval is not proof of completion.
Operating list / Green list / Company report: An operating list or green-data-center list is a published listing of facilities. A company report is a disclosure by a business. Check what the document actually says, which site or phase it covers, and when it was published.
Planning notice / Planning permit: A municipal planning authority’s public notice for one named building project: a pre-approval notice (规划批前公示), a land-use planning permit (建设用地规划许可证) or a construction planning permit (建设工程规划许可证). Official and dated, per building. A permit allows construction; it does not show that construction started or that the building is operating.
Policy / Media / Directory: Policy documents describe government plans or priorities; media sources report news; directories list possible facilities. These can identify leads but are not sufficient by themselves to establish that a facility is operating.
Coverage: Statements about a site by the developer, a government page, state media or the press, in Chinese or English, each with a stored original and a verbatim excerpt. They appear in the timeline, marked with their language and what the source itself says (for example “says: commissioned”). Coverage is shown as context and never counts toward a facility’s status: a site described as “commissioned” in coverage stays a candidate until an official record supports more. A power figure in coverage is kept exactly as the source gives it. It may cover owned and leased capacity and may not specify IT equipment versus whole-site power. It is not confirmed operating capacity.
Timeline / Stored original: The timeline lists every linked document, newest first: the headline (linking to the publisher’s page), who published it, and a quote of what it says about the site. “View stored original” opens the copy kept when the document was collected. Entries are ordered by their recorded event dates; it is a history of evidence, not necessarily a complete construction schedule.

Organizations, licences & connectivity

Operator / Developer / Owner: The operator runs the facility; the developer delivers the project; the owner holds the asset. These roles can belong to different organizations or to the same organization.
Legal entity / Group / Roles: A legal entity is the organization linked to a project, rather than the physical facility itself. A branch (分公司 / 分行) is shown as part of the company named in front of it; that group link is derived from the name alone, so subsidiaries with their own legal identity are never assumed to belong to a group. Roles and provinces summarize what the entity does on its linked facilities.
Registry identifiers: The unified social credit code is the Chinese organization registration identifier; the company profile (listing, founding date, headquarters, owner) comes from Wikidata when its record matches the entity’s exact legal name. China’s company registries are not machine-readable, so most entities have no identifier on file yet; the record simply says so instead of showing empty fields.
MIIT IDC licence: An Internet Data Center service licence recorded in China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology registry. It relates to the operator’s authorization, not proof that a particular building is operating. Check the expiry date and geographic coverage shown in the record.
None held: A licence row appears only once a registry check is recorded. “None held” means a check was recorded and no licence was found for that entity; the connectivity panel still reads “Not looked up yet” when no check exists. Both differ from an expired licence or a licence that does not cover the facility’s province.
Network presence / Backbone / IXP / Cloud region: Network presence is a registry claim that networks connect at a location. A backbone is a major communications network; an IXP is an internet exchange point where networks interconnect. A cloud region is a provider’s geographic service area. Backbone, IXP, and cloud-region labels here describe the wider cluster and do not establish a direct connection at every facility.
Connectivity checks: These provide supporting context and do not advance a facility’s status on their own. A checkmark means supporting information was found; a dot means it was not found; a dash means it was not checked. An operating record without a found licence is flagged for review rather than automatically reclassified.