According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Monday, intelligent computing power now accounts for 30 percent of the country’s total capacity. This is an increase of nearly 5 percentage points from June last year, with the share of intelligent computing expected to reach 35 percent by 2025, according to a July report by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT).
The world’s second-largest economy is pooling its computing resources to accelerate technology development as these and similar hurdles mount. As of late May, China had more than 10 intelligent computing centers with high-performance clusters.
According to CAICT’s estimates, every 1 percent increase in computing power contributes 0.2 percent to the country’s economic growth and 0.4 percent to the growth of the digital economy. The institute also calculated that every yuan invested in the industry will generate three to four times that amount in economic output.
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How does Chinese AI compare to ChatGPT?
How does Chinese AI compare to ChatGPT?
As the rise of AI fuels strong demand for computing power, local governments have accelerated the construction or deployment of their own clusters.
For example, the southwestern city of Chengdu, home to nearly 900 AI companies valued at 78 billion yuan ($10.8 billion), put a new smart computing center into operation on July 2. Local authorities said they expected the center to improve efficiency by up to 80% and save money for research institutes and tech companies.
China last week launched its first IT interconnectivity platform, which will identify, register and test computing resources nationwide and provide AI companies with access to computing power across the country.
Nationally, China plans to build eight IT hubs and 10 data center clusters under a megaproject called “Eastern Data and Western Computing,” which is expected to generate about 400 billion yuan of investment each year.
