China aims to boost the country’s aggregate computing power by more than 50 percent by 2025, a plan released yesterday by authorities showed, as Beijing tightens its focus on supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) innovations.
The plan comes amid rising competition between China and the US in many high-tech areas ranging from semiconductors and supercomputers to AI, including US export controls on chipmaking equipment.
The plan, released by six departments in Beijing including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), has set a target for China’s total computing power to reach 300 EFLOPS by 2025. EFLOPS, equal to 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second, measures a computer’s speed.
Photo: Reuters
SECOND AFTER THE US
The MIIT revealed in August that China’s computing power has reached 197 EFLOPS this year, up from 180 EFLOPS last year. The ministry said it ranks China as second behind the US, but did not elaborate on the scale of the US computing power it referenced.
As AI training requires a large amount of computation, the effort to expand the supply of computing power is increasingly becoming a focus for Beijing.
A blog post by Google last month said that the world’s top-tier generative AI models “will require tens of EFLOPs of AI supercomputing to maintain training times of several weeks or less.”
EXPANSIONS
According to the plan, China aims to build out more data centers across the country to facilitate businesses’ access to computing power.
To meet the demands of the rapidly developing AI industry, Beijing also plans to improve computational infrastructure in western China.
Expansive but less-populated provinces in China such as southwestern Guizhou have long been tasked with establishing massive data centers to power the country’s internet. For example, Apple Inc has set up data centers in Guizhou with a local partner to serve its users in the country.
Another focus is to improve the speed and efficiency of the computation network. The plan said that transmission speeds between critical computing facilities must not allow a latency of more than 5 milliseconds.
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