China’s smart computing gets upgrade as AI demand, tech restrictions drive expansion

The world’s second-largest economy is unifying its computing resources to speed up tech development as these and similar curbs escalate. By the end of May, China had over 10 smart computing centres with high-performance clusters.

According to estimates from CAICT, every 1 per cent increase in computing power contributes around 0.2 per cent to the country’s economic growth, and 0.4 per cent to growth in the digital economy. The institute also calculated that every yuan invested in the industry will generate three to four times that amount in economic output.

As the AI boom fuels a surge in demand for computing power, local governments have supercharged the construction or deployment of their own clusters.

For example, the southwestern city of Chengdu – home to nearly 900 AI companies valued at a cumulative 78 billion yuan (US$10.8 billion) – put a new smart computing centre into operation on July 2. Local authorities said they expected the centre to enhance efficiency by up to 80 per cent and save costs for research institutes as well as tech firms.

China released its first computing interconnectivity platform last week, which will identify, register and test computing resources nationwide and provide AI firms access to computing power from across the country.

On the national level, China plans to build eight computing hubs and 10 data centre clusters in a megaproject called “Eastern Data and Western Computing”, projected to drive around 400 billion yuan in investment each year.