Suzhou

China has two cities called Suzhou, and the one nobody talks about may be running the more interesting experiment. The famous Suzhou in Jiangsu draws tourists to its UNESCO gardens. This Suzhou (宿州) in northern Anhui sits on the Huaibei Plain, home to 5.3 million people and a GDP of ¥245.7 billion ($34 billion), built for generations on coal extraction and wheat farming. Like lichen colonising bare rock — the first organism to transform a surface that nothing else can use — coal mining was the pioneer industry that made this landscape economically habitable.

The coal story followed a familiar arc: extraction, employment, depletion, decline. What happened next did not. In 2011, the municipal government made a decision that seemed absurd for a prefecture in a province still below the national GDP-per-capita average — it designated cloud computing and big data as the city's primary growth sector. A traditional agricultural area in northern Anhui would become a computing hub.

Suzhou repurposed the same advantages that once made it a coal centre — cheap land, abundant power grid capacity, railway connections, flat terrain — to attract server farms instead of mining equipment. The coal economy built the niche; the digital economy moved in.

The bet paid off. Suzhou's Computing Power Industrial Park hosts 465 enterprises generating ¥7.5 billion in annual revenue, with clients including Huawei, QuantumCTek, and Inspur. The city — which brands itself 中国云都 (China's cloud capital) — ranks as one of Anhui's three major intelligent computing centres alongside Hefei and Wuhu, and operates as one of China's national-level quantum communication nodes. It feeds into the national "East Data, West Computing" (东数西算) initiative, which routes processing demand from expensive coastal cities to cheaper inland locations — a deliberate resource reallocation at continental scale. Cities like Suzhou absorb that demand at a fraction of the cost per rack that Shanghai or Hangzhou would charge.

The transformation is ecological succession in economic form. Pioneer species strip an environment of accessible resources but build substrate — soil, nutrient pathways, structural foundations — that later-stage species colonise. Coal mining did exactly this: it built roads, power lines, rail connections, and workforce housing that data centres now occupy.

The original industry fades, but the niche it constructed persists. This is facilitation, the mechanism by which early colonisers make an environment viable for successors that eventually replace them. Agriculture still contributes roughly 14% of GDP, anchored by Dangshan County's pear orchards spanning 26,667 hectares. But the growth margin comes from racks, not seams — and the city has shifted from one stable economic equilibrium to another with no sign of reverting.