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Alice Li

Shanghai has pioneered the synergisation of computing centres with the power grid for peak-load management – a national first – as part of China’s push to enhance computing-grid coordination as its upgrades power infrastructure amid the global artificial intelligence race.
Led by State Grid’s Shanghai subsidiary, the trial achieved a peak load reduction of 97.8 megawatts within a two-hour window, marking the country’s largest single city-level adjustment of computing power load, according to a report on Wednesday by Jiefang Daily, a Shanghai-based official newspaper.
This is equivalent to shutting down the operation of almost 140,000 of Nvidia’s flagship H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) all at once in terms of power capacity. Each unit requires up to 700 watts of power for maximum performance, according to the calculation by the South China Morning Post.
A total of 16 data centre operators took part in the trial, including e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, China Telecom’s Shanghai branch, and data centre firm GDS Holdings. Alibaba owns the SCMP.
Computing-grid coordination aims to transform AI data centres into flexible shock absorbers, which are dispatched by the grid system to ramp up energy-intensive training during green energy surpluses, and scale back operations to shave peak demand during grid strain.
According to State Grid’s Shanghai branch, this latest trial marked the first time a Chinese city had been able to run through the entire technical pipeline of such coordination simultaneously. This involved modulating the data centres’ operational power usage, switching to backup diesel generators when necessary, and shifting computing tasks to other regions to ease the load.
Shanghai’s trial comes as China faces a surge in power consumption driven by the global AI race, which has prompted policymakers to increasingly view computing power as a national utility rather than simply as a resource owned by private firms.

In 2025, China’s data centres consumed 170 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), accounting for roughly 1.6 per cent of the national total, according to data by the National Energy Administration (NEA). It projects demand will grow by more than 100 billion kWh annually over the next five years, reaching 800 billion kWh by 2030 – or 6 per cent of the country’s total electricity consumption.
In response, Beijing has included computing-grid coordination in the government work report for the first time this year, identifying it as a key focus of the national economic agenda.
Earlier this year, policymakers designated computing infrastructure as one of China’s six network investment priorities for the rest of the decade, alongside power grids, water networks, next-generation communications, urban underground pipelines, and logistics systems.
While initiatives like “Eastern Data, Western Computing” helped balance infrastructure geographically, Beijing said it would also optimise the dispatch of computing loads based on the power profiles and flexibility of different tasks, NEA head Wang Hongzhi said at a press conference in late June.
To better align energy distribution with computing infrastructure, Zhang Lin, director of planning at the China Electricity Council, a think tank for China’s power policy, urged that data centres be encouraged to act as flexible resources in the power market.
By following pricing signals that fluctuated depending on when and where power was used, Zhang said that these facilities could chase cheap electricity and automatically cut back when the local grid was under strain, as local financial news channel Yicai reported on Wednesday.


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Led by State Grid’s local subsidiary, trial marks the largest single city-level adjustment of computing power load, says official newspaper


Led by State Grid’s local subsidiary, trial marks the largest single city-level adjustment of computing power load, says official newspaper.


Shanghai synergises computing centres with grid in power infrastructure upgrade

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Led by State Grid’s local subsidiary, trial marks the largest single city-level adjustment of computing power load, says official newspaper

Led by State Grid’s local subsidiary, trial marks the largest single city-level adjustment of computing power load, says official newspaper