China increases subsidies to cut energy bills for data centers, FT says

As Beijing steps up its efforts to boost its domestic chips industry, China has increased its subsidies that cut energy bills for some of its largest data centers, Zijing Wu and Eleanor Olcott of The Financial Times reports. Local governments have beefed up incentives to help companies such as ByteDance, Alibaba (BABA), and Tencent (TCEHY), all of which have been hit with higher electricity costs following Beijing’s ban of purchasing Nvidia’s (NVDA) AI chips, people familiar with the matter told the Times. This comes after several companies complained of higher energy costs while using domestic semiconductors from companies such as Huawei and Cambricon.