China is planning a huge national compute boost by 2025

8 July 2024, 20:23 published

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The Chinese government has announced grand plans to expand its compute capacity by a staggering 30% within the next six months.

At the recent Beijing-held Global Digital Economy Conference 2024, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology representative Wang Xiaoli confirmed that the country currently operates more than 8.1 million data center racks.

With combined processing power equating to 230 exaflops, the country wants to break the 300-exaflop mark by 2025, or in a little less than six months.

China wants 300 exaflops of data center power by 2025

There’s a glimmer of optimism in China’s efforts, with processing power totalling 197 exaflops in 2023 and 180 exaflops in 2022, representing a 9.4% growth. Given immense investments and considerable advancements in recent years, following the launch of publicly available generative AI tools, the 30.4% increase doesn’t seem too unrealistic. Regardless, achieving an additional 70 exaflops in the remaining months of 2023 requires a notable acceleration.

One state media report suggests that Tesla may contribute to this growth. Yovole Network, a Shanghai-based cloud computing data center service provider, partnered with Tesla earlier this year to integrate Megapack energy storage technology at its intelligent computing center.

It has also adopted technologies like hydrogen energy, photovoltaic storage and liquid cooling in order to tackle some of the environmental and sustainability concerns relating to data centers.

Ulanqab, a city in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, has also committed to fueling progress. In its transformation from a traditional livestock hub, the area now wants to play its role in supporting AI infrastructure. Ulanqab aims to provide Beijing with over 10,000 petaflops of green general-purpose computing power annually by next year.

Moreover, the country’s attractive incentives for localized business conduct, for both domestic and international partners, has proven to be successful in transforming the country’s economy from a manufacturing-reliant one to an increasingly digital one.