Can minding servers in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, pay ¥30,000 a month?

Why a potato town became a server town

Ulanqab is a prefecture-level city in central Inner Mongolia with about two million people. It has long been known for potatoes, branding itself China’s “potato capital” and growing about 6% of the national crop, 36Kr reported.

Its climate suits data centres. The average annual temperature is 4.3°C, so cold outside air can be used to cool servers for nearly ten months a year; cooling makes up roughly 30% of a large data centre’s power use. Electricity for data centres is about half the price of the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region, and clean energy makes up 65.9% of the city’s installed generating capacity, according to an article in Shijian magazine republished by Qiushi. Fibre-optic cables laid directly to Beijing carry data there in 4.2 milliseconds.

Ulanqab is one of eight national hub nodes in China’s “East Data, West Computing” plan, which moves computing work to inland regions with cheap power. Huawei arrived in 2013, and Alibaba, Apple, Kuaishou, GDS and Century Internet have followed. Alibaba’s planned investment there exceeds ¥10 billion (about US$1.4 billion).[1][2][3]

The ¥30,000 job ad

On 15 April 2026 DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based AI company behind the DeepSeek chatbot, posted jobs in Ulanqab, the first city outside Beijing and Hangzhou on its careers page. The roles were senior data-centre operations engineer and senior data-centre delivery manager, with monthly pay of up to ¥30,000 (about US$4,200). The listing spread online under the line “¥30,000 a month to guard a server room on the Inner Mongolian grassland”.

The advertised range for the operations role was ¥15,000 to ¥30,000 a month, so the top figure is the ceiling rather than a typical wage.[1][3]

How many jobs there are

By the end of June 2026 Ulanqab had signed 89 data-centre projects from 68 companies, with more than ¥500 billion of planned investment, and its computing power had reached 165,000 P, 36Kr reported. Data centres used 7.3% of the city’s electricity in January to July 2026.

The facilities do not employ many people, however. A gigawatt-scale data centre typically has only a few hundred permanent staff, many of them sent from other regions, and local universities offer few related courses, according to the same report.[1][2]