Mongolia courts data-centre builders with power under 4 cents a kilowatt-hour

Mongolia used a United Nations desertification conference in Ulaanbaatar to pitch itself as a place to park the next wave of computing. On the sidelines of UNCCD COP17, officials said they had signed agreements covering 863 megawatts of data-centre capacity. Prime Minister Nyam-Osor Uchral opened an event titled “Sovereign by Design – Mongolia’s Green AI Data Centre Initiative.” Deputy Prime Minister Togmid Dorjkhand told Euronews the offer is simple: electricity below 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, against 14 to 16 cents in the United States, grid connections within 24 months, and returns around 18 percent.

On 25 August, Novva Group signed a memorandum with the Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Communications. Vincent Wen signed for Novva, Nomin Chinbat for the ministry. The text covers energy-efficient halls, solar and wind, battery storage, site readiness and policy talks. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank was in the room. Novva had held a technical forum three days earlier on the same theme.

Dorjkhand listed three advantages: cheap renewable power, a cold and dry climate that cuts cooling bills, and empty land under a legal regime he described as stable for investors. He also mentioned uranium, coal and other deposits sitting under the same ground. That last point is the tension inside the pitch. A “green AI” label sits next to a mining state that still burns coal for heat through the winter and that invited the world to COP17 to talk about land degradation.

The government has folded the idea into its 2026-2030 plan and into the “Steppe Plan,” a bundle that tries to connect environmental policy, finance and technology. Officials say a national hall would not only store bits. It would host a decision platform that mixes satellite data, remote sensing and geographic information for dryland management. That is a development-bank sentence. The investor sentence is the 4-cent power and the 24-month interconnect.

Data centres follow three scarce things: electrons, permission and pipes. Mongolia can point to wind and solar potential on the steppe and to winter air that does some of the cooling work for free. Permission is a political promise; a memorandum is not a construction permit. Pipes are the hard part. Ulaanbaatar is landlocked. Fibre out to China, Russia and onward to the Pacific has to be redundant or the halls become expensive heaters when a border router dies.

There is a reason dry, cold, cheap-power countries keep making this pitch. Iceland, Norway and parts of Canada got there first with geothermal and hydro. Mongolia is later and farther from the main internet routes. What it can sell is price and land at a moment when AI training clusters are colliding with household power prices in richer countries. Whether 863 megawatts becomes poured concrete depends on whether the first tenant can move a 100-megawatt block from a slide deck to a live rack before the next COP.

For now the record is a set of signatures in a host-country pavilion and a public tariff claim that undercuts US industrial power by a wide margin. That is enough to get site scouts on a plane. It is not yet a hub.