China Plans To Increase Computing Power By More Than 50% By 2025

China plans to increase its computing power (photo: dock. pexels)

JAKARTA - China plans to increase the country's computing power by more than 50% by 2025. This plan was released by the Bamboo Curtain country authorities on Monday, October 9.

This is happening in line with the increasing competition between China and the United States in various fields of high technology. Starting from semiconductors, supercomputers, to artificial intelligence (AI), including US export control of chip-making equipment to China.

The plan was released by six departments in Beijing, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), setting targets for China's total computing power reaching 300 EFLOPS by 2025. EFLOPS is equivalent to one quadrillion floating point operations per second and is used to measure computer speed.

In August, MIIT revealed that China's computing power reached 197 EFLOPS this year, up from 180 EFLOPS in 2022. The ministry said that China was in second place after the United States, but gave no details on the United States' advanced computing power.

Since AI training requires a large number of calculations, efforts to increase the supply of computing power have become a focus for Beijing.

According to a Google blog post last month, the world's generative high-end AI model "will require dozens of supercomputer artificial intelligence EFLOPS to keep training times for several weeks or less."

According to the plan, China plans to build more data centers across the country to facilitate business access to computing power.

Likewise, to meet the needs of the fast-growing AI industry, Beijing also plans to improve computing infrastructure in China's western region.

Provinces in China that are widespread but underpopulated, such as Guizhou in the southwest, have long been tasked with establishing large data centers to support the country's internet. For example, Apple has set up a data center in Guizhou with local partners to serve users in the country.

Another focus is to increase the speed and efficiency of computing networks. The plan states that the speed of transmission between critical computing facilities should not have more than 5 milliseconds of latency.