In the Gobi Desert in Zhongwei, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, companies from across China are racing to claim their piece of the future.

Planning experts say computing power demand has exploded this year, and the region's climate makes it naturally suited to data centers. But the surge has brought a new challenge: Zhongwei is more than 1,000 kilometers from regions such as the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area and the Yangtze River Delta. Even with the highest-grade optical fiber available, the direct connection latency is still 20 milliseconds.

To fix that, engineers have deployed hollow-core fiber between data centers 30 kilometers apart. Its diameter is less than 0.4 millimeters, and 20 thinner glass cylinders line the pipe wall, guiding light through the hollow center. Because light travels faster through air than glass, the result is ultra-low latency, ultra-low loss and ultra-large bandwidth.