CHINA aims to grow the country’s computing power by more than 50% in less than three years, according to a plan released by authorities yesterday, as the country tightens its focus on supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) innovations. The plan, released by six departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), has set a target for China’s total computing power to reach more than 300 EFLOPS across the country’s tech sector by 2025. EFLOPS, equal to one quintillion floating-point operations per second, measures a computer’s speed. The MIIT said in August that China’s computing power has reached 197 EFLOPS this year, up from 180 EFLOPS in 2022. The ministry said it ranks China as second behind the United States, but did not elaborate on the scale of the U.S. 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 China. According to a blog post by Google last month, 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.” The move, set to boost technology self-reliance as U.S. sanctions pressure domestic industry, marks China’s latest attempt to construct digital infrastructure to spur its economy. China also plans to build an additional 20 smart computing centers in two years. Bigger optical networks and more advanced data storage will be installed in the years until 2025, the regulators said. The additional computational power will support manufacturing, education, finance, transportation, health care and energy, they added. “China plans to strengthen the synergy in the industry and safeguard the supply chain by developing controllable solutions and encouraging the use of homegrown, reliable software,” the statement says. Supply chain security is a key aspect of that infrastructure buildup, the agencies emphasized. In order to meet the demands of the rapidly developing AI industry, the government also plans to improve computational infrastructure in western China. Expansive but less populated provinces in China such as southwestern Guizhou have long been tasked to establish massive data centers to power the country’s internet. For example, Apple 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. (SD-Agencies) | 