According to a plan made public by the government on Monday, China intends to increase the nation’s total computing power by more than 50% by 2025 as Beijing narrows its focus on advances in supercomputing and artificial intelligence.
The plan is being implemented in the midst of intensifying competition between China and the US in a number of high-tech industries, including semiconductors, supercomputers, and artificial intelligence.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), one of six Beijing departments that issued the plan, has set a target for China’s total computing power to reach 300 EFLOPS by 2025. A computer’s speed is measured in EFLOPS, or one quintillion floating-point operations per second.
Beijing is putting more and more emphasis on efforts to increase the availability of computer power because AI training necessitates a significant quantity of processing.
The top-tier generative AI models in the world “will require tens of EFLOPs of AI supercomputing to maintain training times of several weeks or less,” according to a blog post published by Google last month. To make it easier for enterprises to obtain computer power, China intends to expand its data centres around the nation.
Beijing also has plans to upgrade the computing infrastructure in western China in order to fulfil the demands of the quickly growing AI industry.
China’s vast but sparsely inhabited provinces, like southwest Guizhou, have long been entrusted with building massive data centres to fuel the nation’s internet. As an illustration, Apple has established data centres in Guizhou with a local partner to support its users there.
Enhancing the computation network’s speed and effectiveness is another priority. According to the proposal, key computer facilities must have transmission speeds that allow latency times of greater than 5 milliseconds.
