China's top chipmaker warns that rushed AI data center capacity could remain idle — SMIC chief says utilizing ballooning capacity 'has not been fully thought through'

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Zhao Haijun, co‑chief executive of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (SMIC), warned that the rapid construction of AI data centers worldwide could leave many facilities idle—mirroring the fate of data centers built in China’s suburbs in the early 2020s, many of which still lack tenants.

“Companies would love to build 10 years’ worth of data center capacity within one or two years,” Bloomberg reported Zhao saying during SMIC’s latest earnings call. “As for what exactly these data centers will do, that has not been fully thought through.”

Read more about the earlier Chinese data‑center boom and its fallout.