SenseTime Asia's largest smart computing center, Lingang, launches a global scramble for the commanding heights of computing power strategy

On January 24, SenseTime announced the official start of operation of the Artificial Intelligence Computing Center (hereinafter referred to as AIDC).

According to reports, SenseTime's AIDC in Lingang, Shanghai, will become one of the largest artificial intelligence computing centers in Asia, with a construction area of 130,000 square meters, a total investment of about 5.6 billion yuan and a phase I cabinet of 5,000. The center is also an important computing power base for SenseTime's AI large device, which is designed with a peak hash rate of up to 3740 Petaflops (1 Petaflop is equal to 100 quadrillion floating-point operations per second) to complete the complete training of 1000 billion parameter models.

Yang Fan, co-founder and vice president of SenseTime, told the first financial reporter: "The largest computing power center we know of in China that has been built is Shenzhen Pengcheng Laboratory, with a computing power of about 1,000 Petaflops. After the completion of SenseTime's AIDC, the scale of Pengcheng is nearly four times that of Pengcheng, and the first phase is planned to use the energy consumption of 5,000 8,000-watt cabinets, and the second phase is also in the planning process. “

SenseTime's final strength will also exceed 4910 Petaflops per second. Up to now, SenseTime has established 23 AI supercomputing clusters in major regional markets, with more than 20,000 GPUs, and the final force has reached 1770 Petaflops per second.

Very large data centers are the trend

In the era of digital economy, data has become a key factor of production. Massive data, intelligent decision-making algorithms and rich application scenarios continue to reshape new models and new formats in thousands of industries, and have become the basic fuel and core engine driving high-quality development in the era of digital economy.

Moving to the megacities and cloud data centers of hyperscale and edge computing is a major trend in the future of data centers.

Cited government data, SenseTime said that by 2030, China will reach the world's leading level in artificial intelligence theory, technology and application, and become the world's major artificial intelligence innovation center. At that time Chinese the scale of the core industry of intelligent industry will exceed 1 trillion yuan, driving the scale of related industries to exceed 10 trillion yuan.

Previously, Wu Hequan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said at the 2022 Digital Economy Summit Forum: "The current computing power has become a new focus of global strategic competition and an important engine for the development of the mainland's national economy, and the level of computing power of global countries is significantly positively correlated with the level of economic development." ”

In November last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a plan, which clearly proposed to optimize the layout of data centers, build green, intelligent and interoperable data and computing power facilities, and accelerate the construction of a new digital and infrastructure system with data and computing facilities as the core.

According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in 2020, the United States will account for 36% of the global computing power, China will account for 31%, and Europe and Japan will account for 11% and 6% respectively. According to the "2020 China Computing Power Development Index White Paper", in 2020, the scale of the computing power industry represented by computers in the mainland will reach 2 trillion yuan, directly driving the total economic output of 1.7 trillion yuan and indirectly driving the total economic output of 6.3 trillion yuan, that is, every 1 yuan invested in the computing power will drive 3-4 yuan of economic output.

The increase in computing power is mainly due to the increase in the number of data center racks. Wu Hequan said: "Although China's computing power has developed rapidly, from the perspective of per capita data center area, it has only reached the level of one-twentieth of the United States, and there is still a lot of room for development. ”

According to the forecast data of the research agency Statista, the global data volume will exceed 2000ZB by 2035; a recent report by Huawei also shows that ai computing power will account for more than 80% of the total computing power of the whole society in the next 5 years.

Hardware drives the development of domestic software ecology

After the completion of SenseTime's AIDC, it will also accelerate the process of localization of chips. At last year's World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, SenseTime, together with universities, industry institutions and industry partners, jointly established the "Artificial Intelligence Computing Power Industry Ecological Alliance". SenseTime expects that by 2024, when all servers are in place, the proportion of AIDC's localization hardware will exceed 50%.

"AIDC's demand for massive computing chip can provide a large-scale application environment for domestic chips, pull the development of domestic chips from the demand side, and thus form a systematic support for the development of localization chips." Yang Fan told the first financial reporter, "AIDC can provide supporting support for domestic chip manufacturers focusing on semiconductor technology itself from scene demand traction to the whole chain of software value ecology, thereby promoting the establishment of domestic AI ecology." ”

In response to the challenge of storing massive data, Yang Fan told the first financial reporter: "The most important challenge of storage is to ensure the security of data, privacy protection, including the isolation of data between different customers, which is also the core key factor of data center service. "To this end, we work with companies that are making private computing and companies that are multi-party secure computing to provide a relatively complete data protection and privacy protection solution." ”

Data compliance and privacy protection have become an important task for most enterprises. In China, a number of emerging technology manufacturers in the field of privacy protection computing, including Nebulas Clustar, Ruilai Wisdom, Huakong Clearance, etc., have been born.

Wang Chen, a market analyst in IDC's Financial Industry in China, told the first financial reporter: "In the construction of an orderly circulation system for data elements, in addition to technology manufacturers building more privacy protection computing nodes and providing more perfect technical solutions for each data party, more data participants are needed to promote the improvement of technical specifications and standards, break through the data circulation barriers caused by technical differences, and ensure that relevant technologies and applications meet the requirements of penetrating supervision, so as to form a data provider in the data chain. A benign ecosystem in which different entities such as data demanders, technology providers, and regulators participate in an orderly manner. ”

When talking about the issue of data governance, Yang Fan said: "As the core means of production in the information age, the greatest value of data is its low cost, replicability, and non-linear growth value after data aggregation. It is necessary to ensure that more data is connected together when the security and privacy are controllable, while at the same time being able to define the ownership and ownership provisions of the use right in the middle, which will be a huge change brought by artificial intelligence to the entire industry and society in the future. ”