Guiyang
China's poorest landlocked province became its data capital—cool mountains + cheap hydropower = ideal server farms. Apple, Huawei, Tencent built data centres here. Software revenue hit 98 billion yuan in 2024, growing 20% annually.
Guiyang became China's data capital because nobody else wanted the mountains. Guizhou province—landlocked, mountainous, historically one of China's poorest—had one advantage that Beijing noticed in the 2010s: cool climate, cheap electricity from hydropower, and caves that provide natural cooling for server farms. The central government designated Guizhou as China's first national big data pilot zone, and Guiyang, the provincial capital, became the command centre. Apple, Huawei, Tencent, and China Mobile built data centres in the surrounding mountains. By 2024, Guiyang housed 1,357 enterprises in its Big Data Sci-Tech Innovation City, with software and IT services generating over 98 billion yuan in revenue—growing 20% year-on-year.
The city's history is more conventional. Founded as a military outpost during the Yuan Dynasty (13th century), Guiyang served as a garrison town guarding the southwestern frontier. The name means 'precious sun'—a reference to the perpetual overcast skies that make sunny days rare and therefore valued. Ethnic Miao, Buyi, and Dong communities shaped the province's culture, and Guiyang remained a peripheral backwater until the Communist era's industrialization programmes brought state-owned enterprises in the 1950s and 1960s.
Guiyang's GDP reached 577.74 billion yuan in 2024, growing 6%. The Gui'an New Area—a special economic zone adjacent to the city—recorded 20% GDP growth for seven consecutive quarters, driven by data centres, new energy batteries, and advanced equipment manufacturing. The province hosts 49 major data centres with computing power exceeding 86 EFLOPS. Guiyang's transformation from one of China's poorest provincial capitals to its computing power hub represents the most unexpected economic pivot in modern Chinese history.
The risk is concentration. If China's data localization policies shift, or if cloud computing migrates to more accessible locations, Guiyang's data economy could prove as ephemeral as the mining booms that once promised to modernize other mountainous regions.