What Huawei's Horinger data center reveals about China's compute gap

Epoch AI estimates Huawei's Horinger data center in Inner Mongolia holds about 105,000 operational Ascend 910C and 8,000 Ascend 910B chips, equal to roughly 81,000 H100-equivalents (90% CI: 36,000 to 141,000). The estimate comes from commercial satellite imagery and a cooling-equipment model that puts the four AI-focused buildings at up to 286 MW of IT power capacity. That leaves Horinger at about 7% of the AI compute in SpaceX's Colossus 2 in Tennessee, and a planned building could raise its capacity by over 70% by early 2028, still far behind Colossus 2's projected 1.8 million H100e.