BEIJING — China’s ambitious effort to power its booming artificial intelligence data center industry with renewable energy is running into serious obstacles, with industry experts pointing to unpredictable electricity demand and reluctant grid operators as major stumbling blocks.
Providing dependable electricity to AI-focused data centers has risen to the level of national strategic priority. China’s 2026 government work report, released earlier this year, specifically called for tighter coordination between computing infrastructure and the country’s power supply networks.
Central to that strategy is a bold plan to route more clean electricity directly to the fast-growing data center sector. Chinese authorities have set a goal for renewable sources to supply 80% of the industry’s total electricity needs by 2030 — a dramatic jump from just 11% in 2023.
The electricity demand coming from China’s data centers is expected to grow by 300 billion to 500 billion kilowatt-hours between 2026 and 2030, representing 18% of the country’s total electricity demand growth during that period, according to Pei Shanpeng, a director at Chinese power company State Power Investment Corp. To put that in perspective, the lower end of that estimate is roughly equal to the entire annual power consumption of the United Kingdom.
Despite this surging demand, experts say data centers are actually a poor match for green energy suppliers when compared to traditional heavy industries like aluminum smelting. The core problem is that data centers’ peak electricity needs are much harder to forecast.
“At least for now, they do not appear to be very flexible (in managing power demand),” Pei said during an industry conference held in Beijing last week.
“From what we understand, they (data centers) cannot really adjust power consumption load much. GPUs are very expensive, so once they are purchased, operators want to use them as quickly and as intensively as possible,” he added.
Pei noted that the push to increase green power use in data centers is driven primarily by the desire to reduce carbon emissions rather than to cut electricity costs for operators.
Experts also cautioned that broader adoption of direct green-power connections to data centers could face pushback from grid operators. Those operators worry that such arrangements would reduce their electricity sales and make it harder to recoup the large investments they’ve made in transmission and distribution infrastructure — especially if demand were to slow or decline.
China’s effort to build dedicated power networks for AI operations comes as the country’s rapid buildout of data centers has already begun straining electricity infrastructure in some regions, driving up both average and peak grid loads and forcing operators to manage the tension between growing demand and reliability concerns.
“If 15% of the power consumption loads can be adjusted, it will significantly reduce capacity expansion pressure on the grid over the next three to five years,” said Wang Zelin, deputy director at State Grid Jibei Electric Power Research Institute.
