China aspires to raise the country’s computing power by 50% by 2025 in order to strengthen the finance and education sectors, according to a plan unveiled Monday by the country’s top ministries.
China wants to raise its technology capacity by 50% by 2025 in order to compete with the United States in artificial intelligence and supercomputing applications, according to the country’s major ministries on Monday.
According to a proposal by six government ministries, including the strong cyberspace regulator, the world’s second-largest economy aspires to have processing capacity equivalent to 300 exaflops. This would represent an increase from the country’s existing 197 exaflop processing power.
An exaflop, or EFLOP, is a computational power unit. According to Counterpoint Research, one exaflop is equivalent to the computational capability of two million standard laptop computers.
According to Chinese authorities, additional processing capacity will be necessary to enable applications in industries such as finance and education.
Increasing computer capacity is viewed as critical to advancing artificial intelligence, which requires improved semiconductors to analyse massive volumes of data.
“China has found that traditionally, every 1 yuan invested in computing power has driven 3–4 yuan of economic output,” a reporter stated in an email. “The investments echo China’s plans to drive economic output through leadership in technology prowess and integrating AI with existing technologies and solutions across all industries and domains.”
Semiconductors and artificial intelligence (AI) have emerged as crucial battlegrounds in the US-China tech competition.
“China aims to invest in growing its computing power, especially AI, as it sees its major cloud providers launching AI solutions en masse for consumers and enterprises,” the reporter said in a statement.
China intends to focus on memory storage and data transmission networks as part of its computing drive, and it also intends to create more data centers.
These are essential for cloud computing players to expand their presence. Many AI applications are being sold through cloud computing services, such as those provided by Chinese conglomerates such as Alibaba and Tencent.
According to the Chinese ministries, the supply chain’s security would also be tightened.
The country’s technology supply chain has been under strain in recent years as the US has used export limits and other sanctions to isolate the Asian nation from crucial technologies such as chips.
In response, China has attempted to strengthen the capacity of its domestic industries in some of these areas.
Washington took note of a recent incident in which Chinese tech leader Huawei released a new smartphone with a 5G processor—an unexpected result given that US sanctions were supposed to prevent this.
China’s plans to increase computing power could be hampered by US sanctions that limit the country’s access to essential semiconductors such as graphics processing units, or GPUs, offered by American chip designer Nvidia.
“Access to the latest and best-in-class AI chips and GPUs is the primary obstacle that the country faces due to the chip ban on expanding its AI data centers,” the reporter said in a statement.
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