Galaxy, SemiAnalysis's "Chinese Stargate", comes with its own wind farms

In short

• According to SemiAnalysis, Galaxy is planned for up to 800MW of IT capacity, the same league as Stargate Abilene in Texas. First phase: 120MW delivered within a year, "at a fifth of US costs", with neither amount given in the free part.
• Envision builds its own wind farms and dedicated power line, and aims to supply over 60% of the first two phases' power with its own wind.
• In China's market, according to SemiAnalysis, building costs less than $3 million per megawatt, and power in Inner Mongolia costs about $0.055 per kilowatt-hour.

A visit in September, a report on a Saturday night

On Saturday night I had decided to stop reading. Then SemiAnalysis, the reader-supported analysis publication that also launched the GDPx ranking of AI models on office tasks, published its travel notes from Inner Mongolia. I opened the laptop again.

The starting point is Stargate Abilene in Texas, "the symbol of America's AI buildout": a gigawatt-scale campus built for OpenAI. Crusoe, which began building it in mid-2024, describes it as 1.2GW of power, which comes to about 820MW for the machines according to SemiAnalysis. Galaxy plans up to 800MW of capacity reserved for the servers (a megawatt is a million watts). Same league.

The first 120MW phase was delivered in August 2026, within a year, "at a fifth of US costs". A fifth of how much? The free part gives neither Galaxy's cost nor the US benchmark. It does give the setting: nearly 30,000 construction workers across 22 datacenter projects around the campus, according to a local report cited by SemiAnalysis, and four phases, all built-to-suit for two internet giants, not named. The full campus is expected by the end of 2027.

Envision owns the wind, the line and the battery

Imagine your electricity supplier also building your house, running the cable to your meter and making the battery in your garage: that's roughly Envision at Galaxy. The company comes from energy, with more than 100GW of wind turbines installed worldwide, and its blade factory sits just across the road. China has a name for the setup, "source-grid-load-storage": wind turbines, batteries and datacenter linked by a dedicated line instead of the public grid. The appeal for the big cloud customers: long-term power at a largely fixed cost.

Still, the wind does not blow on demand. A wind farm in Inner Mongolia produces on average as much as if it ran flat out for 2,800 hours a year, out of 8,760: a capacity factor of roughly 32%, and 35–40% in Ulanqab. Envision still aims for over 60% wind for the first two phases, with three levers:

• two wind farms about 80km apart, to cut the hours with no wind at either;
• 420MW of turbines for a 240MW load, about 1.75 times the consumption;
• a 4-hour battery that shifts power from windy hours into calm ones.

In a 5MW hall, the power arrives as direct current

This is the passage I read twice. Usually, between the grid and the servers, power goes through low-voltage transformers, UPS and rectifiers. In one 5MW hall at Galaxy, solid-state transformers (SSTs) take 10kV alternating current from the grid and convert it straight to 800V direct current for the server racks. The stages in between disappear. In the US, this architecture is still on the roadmap.

In China, roughly a quarter of datacenters built in the past decade run on DC, while about 97% of US datacenters still use AC UPS. Even the substation, co-designed by Envision, arrives as modules tested in the factory: less than 3 months in total, versus about 6 for a conventional indoor substation.

On cooling, a single water loop serves both liquid- and air-cooled servers, with no central chiller, while most US datacenters keep one.

The bill, with the figures we actually have

Kira asked me how much Galaxy cost. I didn't have the answer. The free part only gives prices for China's datacenter market, according to SemiAnalysis:

• building: less than $3 million per megawatt, down about 25% over five years;
• renting: about $40 per kilowatt per month excluding power, roughly half what it was five years ago. If you rented 1MW (1,000 kilowatts) in that market, that would be about $40,000 a month (our calculation);
• powering: about $0.055 per kilowatt-hour all-in in Inner Mongolia. If you ran 1MW for one hour, that would be 1,000kWh, so about $55 (our calculation).

For the two five-year declines, SemiAnalysis doesn't give the starting amounts: I only have where prices landed, market prices, not Galaxy's own.

The catch: project returns are thin, with "IRRs squeezed hard". For Envision, the reward lies elsewhere: datacenters create new demand for the power and equipment it already produces. In the US, developers bridge the power gap with on-site gas turbines, fuel cells and batteries. On the gas side, Kira did the division on Anthropic's purchase of gas generators from OnePWR. Doing everything in-house (vertical integration), a real edge? Too early to say, SemiAnalysis answers.

What stays behind the paywall

The free part stops on a heading, "The China speed: 120MW in under 12 months", then the door shuts. The detail is for paid subscribers, on three announced topics:

• speed and cost: from land auction to customer acceptance, and why capex keeps falling;
• power: the 240V DC that China adopted years ago, and the 5MW pilot, with a larger version planned for the next phase;
• cooling: a design common in northern China, offered as one answer to the US chiller debate.

The next announced report will cover the whole Inner Mongolia market, its 25GW (25,000MW) of announced datacenter projects, and data that, according to SemiAnalysis, "tells a different story" from the picture of empty halls.

My take: what struck me isn't the size, Abilene plays in the same league. It's the blade factory across the road. When the company that makes the wind turbines is also the landlord, the electrician and the battery maker, the bill has only one address.

Key terms

• Megawatt (MW), gigawatt (GW): a million watts, a billion watts. A measure of electrical power.
• IT capacity: the share of a datacenter's power reserved for the servers themselves. The whole site needs more.
• Kilowatt-hour (kWh): the energy used by 1,000 watts of power for one hour. 1MW for one hour = 1,000kWh.
• Alternating current (AC), direct current (DC): the grid delivers AC, which keeps changing direction; DC always flows in the same direction. Going from one to the other takes conversion equipment.
• Volt (V), kilovolt (kV): the "pressure" of an electric current; 10kV = 10,000 volts.
• Rectifier: the equipment that turns AC into DC.
• SST (solid-state transformer): an electronic transformer that, at Galaxy, converts grid power straight into DC for the servers.
• UPS (uninterruptible power supply): the equipment that keeps servers powered during an outage.
• Substation: the installation that receives high-voltage power and steps it down for the site.
• 4-hour battery: a battery that can deliver its full power for 4 hours straight.
• Central chiller: the large refrigeration plant that cools the water for a whole datacenter.
• Capacity factor: what a wind turbine produces over a year, compared with what it would produce running flat out all year.
• Vertical integration: one company handles several links of the chain itself, from the wind turbine to the datacenter.
• IRR (internal rate of return): what an investment yields per year, on average over its whole life, as a percentage of the sum invested.
• Capex (capital expenditure): the money spent to build and equip a site, as opposed to running costs.

Source sheet

• Who: SemiAnalysis, "We Visited China's Stargate in Inner Mongolia", by Everlyn Tan, Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, Xiaopeng Laoban and Dylan Patel.
• Date: published on 07/11/2026 at 19:01 UTC. Site visit in September.
• Access: paywalled article. Only the part shown before the paywall was read and used; nothing beyond it was read.
• Link: SemiAnalysis's report on Galaxy

Source passages

A single source, the free part of the SemiAnalysis report, copied on 08/11/2026 at 08:05 UTC and re-read on 09/11/2026 at 05:51 UTC (identical text). References S1 to S8 point to passages of that same text. Amounts in US dollars.

Show the 8 sources

Ref.	Quote (original language)	URL
S1↑1↑2↑3↑4↑5	"Stargate Abilene has become the symbol of America's AI buildout. It is a gigawatt-scale campus on the Texas plains built for OpenAI. China has campuses on a similar scale, though few people outside the country have had a look inside. In September, we visited one" ; "we toured Inner Mongolia, China's fastest-growing AI datacenter region. It's the "West Texas" of China, but while the Lone Star State faces its highest ever anti-datacenter sentiment, Inner Mongolia is accelerating and faces no such backlash." ; "Our main stop was Galaxy, a campus in Ulanqab planned for up to 800MW of IT capacity." ; "Its first 120MW phase was delivered within a year at a fifth of US costs. All four phases are built-to-suit for two internet giants." ; "When we visited, the rest of the campus was still a busy construction site, and the surrounding Chahar High-tech Zone had nearly 30,000 construction workers on site across 22 datacenter projects according to a local report."	https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/we-visited-chinas-stargate-in-inner
S2↑1↑2↑3↑4↑5	"The datacenter is owned by Envision Group, a renewable systems integrator with more than 100GW of wind turbines installed worldwide." ; "Beyond running the datacenter, Envision builds its own wind farms and a dedicated power line to supply it. Its blade factory sits just across the road from the Galaxy datacenter campus" ; "Inside the campus, it designed and integrated the low-voltage power modules and the 800V system, manufactured the battery storage that smooths the load, and co-designed the prefabricated substation." ; "Its initial phase was delivered in August 2026, and the full campus is expected to be completed by the end of 2027."	https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/we-visited-chinas-stargate-in-inner
S3↑1↑2	"Crusoe began building Abilene in mid-2024 and leased it to Oracle, which runs it for OpenAI. Crusoe describes the eight-building campus as 1.2GW of power, which comes to about 820MW of critical IT capacity, on par with the 800MW planned at Galaxy."	https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/we-visited-chinas-stargate-in-inner
S4↑1↑2↑3↑4	"Galaxy's power comes through a model China calls source-grid-load-storage ("SGLS"). Under this model, a project builds its own wind and/or solar farm, battery storage and datacenter, and links them through a dedicated line instead of the public grid." ; "For hyperscalers, the appeal of an SGLS project is long-term power at a largely fixed cost." ; "A wind farm here runs on average about 2,800 full-load hours a year, a capacity factor of roughly 32%. Ulanqab is windier, with a capacity factor of 35–40%." ; "Envision aims to supply over 60% of the first two phases' power use with its own wind farms." ; "The two wind farms are about 80km apart, which cuts the hours in a year when neither has wind." ; "The wind farms have a combined 420MW of installed capacity, about 1.75 times the 240MW datacenter load." ; "A 4-hour battery storage system shifts power from windy hours into calm ones."	https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/we-visited-chinas-stargate-in-inner
S5↑1↑2↑3	"In one 5MW hall, we saw the 800V system at work. Solid-state transformers (SSTs) take 10kV AC from the grid and convert it straight to 800V DC for the racks. This removes the low-voltage transformers, UPS and rectifier stages in between. The same architecture is still on the US roadmap" ; "800V DC is the architecture that Nvidia is pushing for its next generation of high-density racks, as Kyber racks at around 600kW cannot be served efficiently at today's voltages." ; "Today, roughly a quarter of Chinese datacenters built in the past decade run on DC, while about 97% of US datacenters still use AC UPS." ; "The substation is built and tested as modules in the factory while civil work goes on at the site, then shipped and connected on site. This takes less than 3 months, versus about 6 months for a conventional indoor substation."	https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/we-visited-chinas-stargate-in-inner
S6↑	"Liquid- and air-cooled servers share one water loop, with no central chiller plant. [...] most datacenters in the US keep one for air-cooled equipment"	https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/we-visited-chinas-stargate-in-inner
S7↑1↑2↑3↑4↑5	"Rents have roughly halved over the past five years, to about $40/kW/month excluding power. Capex has fallen about 25% over the same period, to less than $3mm per MW. Power in Inner Mongolia costs about $0.055/kWh all-in, among the lowest in the world." ; "Project returns are thin, with IRRs squeezed hard, so the reward often comes from elsewhere. For Envision, datacenters create new demand for the power and equipment it already produces." ; "In the US, developers bridge the power gap with on-site gas turbines, fuel cells and batteries." ; "It is too early to say whether vertical integration will become a meaningful advantage in China's datacenter market."	https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/we-visited-chinas-stargate-in-inner
S8↑1↑2	"Behind the paywall, we walk through how Galaxy was built and designed in detail." ; "On speed and cost, we follow Galaxy from land auction to customer acceptance and explain why capex keeps falling." ; "On power, we trace how China took a different path from the US, adopting 240V DC in its datacenters years ago, and walk through Galaxy's live 5MW pilot. A larger version is planned for the next phase." ; "On cooling, we take apart a design common in northern China that offers one answer to the chiller debate in the US." ; "The China speed: 120MW in under 12 months" ; "This post is for paid subscribers" ; "Our next report will take a wider view of Inner Mongolia's datacenter market. The region has lined up 25GW of announced datacenter projects [...] Many reports picture it as a land of empty datacenter halls. Our data tells a different story."	https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/we-visited-chinas-stargate-in-inner