From the Gobi Desert to Canada’s North: This Chinese visionary is betting on AI to power this country’s future
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Near the edge of China’s Gobi Desert, massive wind hubs managed by artificial intelligence are churning out electricity at a fraction of the cost of coal power.
Now, the visionary behind the technology says he's ready to replicate that model in remote parts of Canada.
Lei Zhang is the billionaire founder of Envision, a Shanghai-based green energy giant that's recently become the second-largest manufacturer of wind turbines in the world.
With the cost of producing green energy falling by more than 90 per cent in recent decades, Zhang says China has passed a historic threshold: it is now cheaper to build new solar and wind facilities than to keep old coal-fired plants running.
Envision’s signature project is an off-grid, closed-loop facility in China’s Inner Mongolia region, north of Beijing. Sitting on the edge of the Gobi Desert, the plant, which was opened in July 2025, uses 1.4 gigawatts (GW) of wind turbines to produce hundreds of thousands of tonnes of net-zero hydrogen and ammonium annually.
"We definitely … can replicate it in Canada," said Zhang, noting that Canada’s vast wilderness creates endless opportunities for similar off-grid energy plants that could power the country for decades to come.
