China is banking on artificial intelligence (AI) to become a new growth engine, and there are projections that it could add several trillion yuan to the economy by 2035 amid a national push for computing power and a unified data market.
Advertisement
Beijing is knitting together a national computing network. At the China Computing Power Conference held in Datong, Shanxi province, over the weekend, officials announced that 10 provinces and municipalities – from Shanghai and Zhejiang in the east to Qinghai and Xinjiang in the west – had joined a unified platform designed to match business demand with underused resources across regions.
State broadcaster CCTV said the platform had already signed up more than 100 service providers, 1,000 industry users and nearly 100 AI models.
The country has invested heavily in expanding computing power over the past five years, and its smart computing power is projected to grow by 43 per cent this year, according to an AI-computing-power assessment report published earlier this year by the International Data Corporation and Inspur Information.
The country has been pouring money into data centres and chips in recent years amid a self-reliance push, with overall computing capacity expanding by about 30 per cent annually.
AI could contribute more than 11 trillion yuan to China’s GDP by 2035
From 2023 to 2028, China’s smart computing power is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 46.2 per cent, compared with 18.8 per cent for general-purpose computing power, according to the report.
