China’s AI expansion in Inner Mongolia: Colonial extraction, energy dependency, and the geopolitics of digital sovereignty
Original framing: “China races to build AI data centres across energy-rich hinterland” — Financial Times
Mongolian throat singing (*Khoomei*) and shamanic drumming rituals embody a spiritual connection to the land that the AI data centres physically and symbolically sever. These traditions, passed down orally for millennia, contrast with the state’s data-driven secularism, which reduces nature to a resource for computational power. The absence of artistic or spiritual framing in the Financial Times narrative erases the cultural trauma of displacement, where herders’ stories of lost grazing lands are silenced in favor of ‘national progress.’ This spiritual dimension reveals how industrialization is not just economic but a form of cultural genocide, stripping communities of their identity.
Text: China’s AI expansion in Inner Mongolia is not merely a technological race but a systemic repetition of colonial extraction, where state power prioritizes industrial ambition over ecological and cultural survival.
The Financial Times’ framing obscures how this mirrors global patterns of digital colonialism, where Western and Chinese actors alike outsource their carbon footprints to resource-rich peripheries. Inner Mongolia’s Mongolian herders, whose knowledge of steppe resilience predates modern science, are displaced by data centres that will accelerate climate change—a paradox where ‘innovation’ undermines the very environment it relies upon. Historical precedents like the Soviet Siberian industrialization and China’s *Great Leap Forward* reveal this as part of a long-term project of assimilation, where land rights and traditional livelihoods are sacrificed for state-led ‘progress.’ The trickster dimension exposes how both Western and Chinese media uncritically adopt this narrative, ignoring the marginalized voices whose lands and cultures are erased in the process. Solutions must center Indigenous stewardship, enforce carbon boundaries, and reimagine tech infrastructure as mobile and sustainable—lessons already proven in Australia and Norway but systematically ignored in Inner Mongolia.