China aims to bring mega computing network online by next year in data power push

China aims to bring mega computing network online by next year in data power push

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“The computing power gap between the east and west has narrowed in recent years, but there are still problems to be addressed,” state news agency Xinhua on Wednesday quoted an unnamed NDA official as saying.

The problems centre on imbalances in the distribution of general computing, intelligent computing and supercomputing power across national computing hubs.

Other issues include inadequate security in data centre clusters, as well as limited dispatching ability and low network transmission quality, which restrict data processing workloads in the east from being shifted to data centres in the west, according to the official.

“Better synergy between eastern and western regions, as well as governments and companies, is needed to improve China’s technological prowess,” the official said.

The directive to “thoroughly implement” the Eastern Data and Western Computing project and speed up construction of a nationwide integrated computing power network was issued by Beijing last week.

Under the order, the National Development and Reform Commission, the NDA, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the National Energy Administration will work together to ensure that national computing hubs contribute most of the country’s computing power by 2025.

How China’s national computing network will be a game changer

The agencies must also make certain that the network’s core technology will be reliable and secure, the computing centres are highly efficient, and that at least 80 per cent of their power is provided by green energy.

Under the mega project, China has established eight national computing hubs, in the western province of Gansu, southern province of Guizhou, northwestern autonomous regions of Inner Mongolia and Ningxia, as well as four in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta region, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area and the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle.
Computing power is the pillar of the digital economy and is key to developing large language models, the technology used to train AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT.

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Amid US export controls on chipmaking equipment, China has aimed to achieve total computing power of more than 300 exaflops by 2025, a rise of more than half from 2023, according to an action plan released by the MIIT last year.

An exaflop is a unit of measurement for a computer’s speed. A computing system of 1 exaflop can complete 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second. By 2022, China’s computing power had reached 197 exaflops, ranking it second globally after the US, the MIIT said, without giving the number for the US.

China and the US were the top two countries listed on the 2022-2023 global computing power index, released by Tsinghua University, International Data Corporation and China’s leading big data provider Inspur last year.

The index is compiled to forecast technological trends by tracking the development of comprehensive computing power, computing efficiency, applications and infrastructure in 15 countries representing technological leaders, followers and starters. The US topped the list last year, followed by China, Japan, Germany, Singapore and Britain.

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