Karamay, once known as the "oil city" in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, has evolved from an oil hub to a digital powerhouse with significant computing capacity, following rapid development over the past few decades.
Seventy years ago, Karamay was little more than an isolated area in the Gobi Desert. That changed on Oct 29, 1955, when a team of 36 young people struck a gushing flow of oil at Well No. 1 after months of efforts and created China's first major oilfield. Leading the team was 22-year-old Lu Mingbao from Shanghai at that time.
"When Well No.1 first produced oil, everyone was so excited that they cried. Many smeared the crude oil on their faces to feel how precious it was," said Lu Keyi, a retired staff member with the Xinjiang Oilfield Company, China National Petroleum Corporation.
From that single well, Karamay has grown to encompass more than 40,000 wells and produced over 10 million tons of oil annually for 23 consecutive years, contributing a total of 460 million tons to national output, thanks to technological advancements.
With artificial intelligence-boosted simulations and high-precision sensors, robots are replacing in-person inspections. The coverage rate of Internet of Things (IoT) at the Xinjiang oilfield, China's first "digital oilfield," has reached 93.7 percent.
[The robot] will transmit dozens of engineering parameters to the production command center via satellites every six seconds," said Zhi Zhiying, a senior engineer with the digital intelligent technology company of the Xinjiang Oilfield Company, China National Petroleum Corporation.
Smart management has significantly increased efficiency: whereas 20 workers were once needed to manage 300 wells, now a single worker can handle the same workload.
The establishment of the very digital platform has also laid the foundation for Karamay's broader leap into the data industry. The city's platforms now track industries from energy to agriculture. Even Xinjiang's livestock herds are connected, with vaccination and health information being uploaded in real-time.
"All those little red dots are vaccination records uploaded by our epidemic prevention workers. You can see who the officer was, which farmer was involved, and what kind of animal was vaccinated," said Zhang Runqi, a project manager with the Xinjiang Rainbow Flower Information Technology CO., Ltd.
The company alone collects over 500,000 records daily, reflecting livestock health trends across Xinjiang and informing scientific herding practices. Such data flows require immense computing power. In the city's cloud computing park, six large-scale data centers are already operational, hosting more than 100 enterprises.
"Electricity is the biggest demand for data centers. And power resources are abundant here in the western area. Electricity costs dropped from more than 1 yuan (about 0.14 U.S. dollar) per unit in Shanghai to just 0.4 yuan [in Karamay]," said Wang Tao, general manager of the Kelamayi Carbon Neutral Network Technology Co., Ltd.
Beyond low costs, the region's natural advantages, including stable geology, 1,700 hours of sunshine annually, and a cold and dry climate, have provided ideal conditions for the computing power industry to cool servers and charge solar panels.
Dedicated data express lines connect Karamay to Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, enabling fast data transmission in just a fraction of a second. For example, data could be transmitted between Beijing and Karamay nine times in one second.
"This means we can support almost all intelligent computing businesses, like the basic backups and the large language model inference, which could be carried out right here in northwestern area," said Wang Tao, general manager of the Karamay Carbon Neutral Network Technology Co., Ltd.
The results are already visible. Karamay now houses the largest film and animation rendering base in northwest China, which has powered blockbusters such as "The Wandering Earth" and the "Boonie Bears."
With its core digital economy growing at more than 10 percent annually over the past few years, the once "oil city on the Gobi Desert" is steadily emerging as a "new city of computing power."
Xinjiang's Karamay transforms from 'oil wells' into computing power hub of digital towers
