China Accelerating Plans to Boost its Computing Power

Last year (in 2021), the market size of China's computing power industry exceeded 1.5 trillion yuan ($222.4 billion).

Cover Image Attribute: In May 2022, a visitor checks out an intelligent city system displayed at an international big data expo in Guiyang, Guizhou province. / Source: Xinhua

According to the most recent data from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the country's computing power industry, which includes the production of fiber optic cables and data storage devices, grew by an average of over 30 percent during the past five years. 

MIIT released the data at the 2022 China Computational Power Conference, which took place in Jinan, east China's Shandong Province. Eight companies, including China Mobile, Huawei, China Telecom, and Alibaba Cloud, signed agreements on computing infrastructure and initiated more than ten national data center projects during the conference's opening ceremony, with the total investment hitting nearly 50 billion yuan.

In general, computing power refers to the capacity to process data. In the era of the digital economy, it encompasses the information infrastructure and technologies that support processing power, data storage, and network capacity.

Currently, China is only second to the United States in global computing power. All prefecture-level cities have successfully deployed optical network broadband, and the number of users of gigabit fiber has surpassed 61 million. At the end of June, China had around 1.9 million 5G base stations, and more than 450 million people in the country used 5G mobile phones.

Last year in November 2021, a Beijing-based government think tank, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), released a White Paper on China's Computing Power Development Index. To comprehensively sort through and objectively evaluate China's computing power development situation, CAICT has developed this index. It considers the characteristics of computing power development and the key influencing factors of computing power development.

According to that white paper, in May 2021, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission (OCCAC), the National Energy Commission (NEC), and MIIT issued the National Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System Computing Power Hub Implementation Plan (全国一体化大数据中心协同创新体系算力枢纽实施方案, in Mandarin) jointly. This plan explicitly proposed the laying out of a nationwide computing power network of national hubs and nodes, and it also launched the implementation of the "eastern data, western compute" project. 

Later in July 2021, MIIT issued the Three-Year Action Plan for the New Data Centers (2021-2023) (新型数据中心发展三年行动计划(2021-2023年)解读, in Mandarin). This plan specifies that a new data center development pattern will have basically taken shape in three years. This pattern will be rationally laid out, technologically advanced, green, and low-carbon, and in which the scale of computing power is commensurate with the growth of the digital economy.

As of 2021, the market size of China's computing power industry exceeded 1.5 trillion yuan ($222.4 billion), with cloud computing exceeding 300 billion yuan, internet data center services over 150 billion yuan, and artificial intelligence over 400 billion yuan.

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