Beijing Military City may be top cover for a covert AGI program

Beijing Military City (BMC) could provide top cover for a covert, artificial general intelligence (AGI)-focused data center campus.

Per Financial Times reporting, BMC is a massive (~1,500 acres, or 10x the Pentagon), high-security complex in southwest Beijing, and shows indications of underground construction, outside of satellite visibility. BMC's stated purpose justifies a massive security presence and provides plausible deniability.

BMC's surface geography is highly supportive of a massive, AGI-focused data center campus. Data centers are huge facilities, and BMC is already a massive complex - far bigger than Meta's planned ~92 acre campus in Richland Parish. Moreover, BMC can expand in multiple directions, including by subsuming a nearby golf course; it can also access Qinglong Lake. Significantly, the lake could not only provide cooling but also mask a data center campus’ thermal signature, to a degree.

Furthermore, for training AGI-focused models, it’s better to have a single, massive data center campus rather than geographically separated sites, due to latency penalties. Training AI models requires communication across hundreds of thousands or even millions of graphics processing units, or GPUs. While photons travel at the speed of light, geographically separated facilities suffer performance and efficiency losses due to delays in moving, processing, or synchronizing data across training infrastructure. Therefore, if you wanted to build an AGI-focused data center campus, you’d want to build a massive facility, such as what BMC could potentially accommodate.

It's important to note that there is no public evidence of large-scale AI computing facilities at this time, based on my preliminary, non-specialist review of potential data center infrastructure indicators. Of course, if the CCP were committed to a covert AGI program, it would seek to conceal any evidence.

While BMC likely does serve as a hardened command center, that may not be its only role. BMC may partially or even primarily serve as top cover for an AGI-focused data center campus.

Image: ChatGPT5-generated image of excavators digging in Beijing Military City

If you’d like to learn more about the US-PRC AI/AGI competition, you can see this analysis for War On The Rocks: Sprinters, Marathoners & Skeptics on the Future of AI & Power; I also went on the WOTR’s Insider podcast to discuss the article and BMC.

Until next time,

Joe

Joe Webster is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and editor of the China-Russia Report. This article represents his own personal opinion.

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