China wants a share of the gas turbine market that GE Vernova, Siemens and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have had to themselves. Its National Energy Administration said this week that domestic manufacturers should speed up their technology development and go after data center projects abroad, Bloomberg reported on 12 November.
Wang Yunbo, deputy director of the regulator's market regulation department, told the People's Daily that the gap between power supply and demand at data centers is widening and turbine capacity is tight, with waits of more than five years at the major global suppliers. He called that an opportunity and a challenge for Chinese industry at the same time.
A Supply Chain Of Its Own By 2030
Behind the statement is a policy paper published earlier in November. According to Bloomberg, it sets out to close the technology gap with foreign makers and to build an independently controlled turbine supply chain by 2030. The weak points it addresses are turbine blades and high-temperature materials. State-backed projects and public procurement are to put more Chinese machines into service, so that they collect operating hours and their reliability improves.
The two largest makers, Dongfang Electric and Shanghai Electric, already export. Dongfang shipped a unit to Kazakhstan in August. Shanghai Electric has a turnkey contract for the Samalaju combined-cycle plant of Sarawak Energy in Malaysia, OilPrice.com reports.
30 Turbines For Canada
The order that stands out comes from North America. Dongfang has an order for 2.1 GW of turbines from a Canadian data center developer, according to Bloomberg. OilPrice.com names the customer as Eco DC Solutions and says the agreement covers 30 Dongfang gas turbines for more than 2.1 GW; it dates the signing to October, Bloomberg to November. The turbine model has not been published.
The demand side is well documented. OilPrice.com cites JP Morgan figures of 38 GW of new gas turbine orders worldwide in the second quarter of 2026, 71% more than a year earlier, with the United States taking half and the makers holding no stock. BloombergNEF expects data center electricity use to quadruple to 2,354 TWh by 2035, about 7% of world consumption.
What A Buyer Will Ask
A turbine available in two years instead of six is tempting for a developer with a signed tenant, and the earlier rush to converted jet engines shows how far buyers go for early power. A new supplier still has to answer the usual questions: fleet hours of the exact model, where the service engineers sit, how long a spare hot-section part takes to arrive, and whether the package was ever run in the climate of the site. Cold starts on a Canadian winter morning are a different duty from a Malaysian coast.
The auxiliaries follow the turbine. Lube oil cooling, enclosure ventilation and inlet air systems are specified around the main unit, and a model with little field history makes that work slower, not faster. Anyone planning a data center power plant on such machines should expect more questions at the design review, and more of them answered by test rather than by reference.
Sources: Bloomberg via Energy Connects, OilPrice.com
