China rolls out plan to boost computing power infrastructure

Six Chinese government departments, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, have jointly released an action plan to promote the high-quality development of computing infrastructure in China.

China’s computing power is in a race against the U.S.

According to an Oct. 9 joint announcement by several Chinese governmental agencies, the action plan aims to strengthen China’s capabilities in computing power, network transmission, and data storage by 2025.

One of the primary objectives is to dramatically increase our computing power, aiming for a threshold beyond 300 exaflops — each exaflop represents the capability to compute one quintillion floating point operations per second. What’s interesting to note here is the emphasis on intelligent computing, which is anticipated to form 35% of the entire computing power.

While it is not entirely clear, from the context, it appears that what translates as “intelligent computing” is a subset of computing power enhanced for or meant to be used in artificial intelligence applications. Furthermore, there’s a strategic vision of ensuring that the development of this immense computing power is distributed evenly between the eastern and western parts of China.

Those data centers target a network transmission latency that’s no more than 1.5 times the theoretical minimum. The vision also includes embracing forward-thinking networking standards, with IPv6 and SRv6 projected to form a significant 40% of both backbone and metro networks.

Storage is another pivotal area of focus

The nation is gearing up to amplify its total storage capacity, aspiring to surpass 1,800 exabytes — each exabyte equivalent to one billion gigabytes. Additionally, China plans a 100% backup coverage of core data in pivotal industries.

Beyond just infrastructure, there’s also a vision to spur innovation in harnessing this computing power. This entails nurturing and encouraging a variety of new business models and novel ways to apply computing power. For instance, there’s a drive to significantly increase the integration of this advanced computing in sectors like manufacturing and finance.

The success stories from these sectors are intended to be replicated and broadened in areas such as healthcare and transportation. Those will be followed by further expansion into fields like energy and education. The goal is to have at least 30 benchmark applications in every crucial domain.

Key measures outlined in the plan include optimizing the layout of computing facilities, building an efficient computing network, promoting the collaborative development of computing and storage, enabling deeper industry applications of computing power, facilitating green and low-carbon computing, and strengthening security capabilities.

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