The Financial Times reported on October 8 that Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia has 89 signed data-center projects, with Alibaba, Huawei, Kuaishou and third-party operators building there, drawn by cheap power, land and a climate suited to server cooling; the city aims to become a "capital of tokens." Prices are falling at the same time: Reuters reported in May that DeepSeek made a 75% cut to its V4-Pro API pricing permanent, taking tiers from 0.1–24 yuan per million tokens down to 0.025–6 yuan, while the FT in October cited Silicon Data's token price index showing composite token prices more than 52% below their May peak, though not all models fell equally. The article pairs Alibaba's 67.68 billion yuan quarterly capex (up 75% year on year) with 48.44 billion yuan in AI cloud and compute revenue (up 45%), arguing that China's AI competition is moving from acquiring compute to operating it, with depreciation and payback now the hard questions.