China has increased subsidies that cut energy bills by up to half for some of the country’s largest data centres, as Beijing steps up efforts to boost its domestic chips industry and compete with the US, reports the Financial Times. Local governments have beefed up incentives to help Chinese tech giants such as ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, which have been hit with higher electricity costs following Beijing’s ban on purchasing Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips, according to people familiar with the matter.
They added that the new subsidies come after several tech groups complained to regulators about the increased costs of using domestic semiconductors from companies such as Huawei and Cambricon, most of which are less energy-efficient than Nvidia’s.
Local governments in data centre-heavy provinces such as Gansu, Guizhou and Inner Mongolia have responded by offering subsidies that slash big data centres’ electricity bills by as much as 50%, provided that they are powered by domestic chips.