China has always stressed the importance of rejuvenating the country through science and technology. In the era of digital economy, the power of technology is more prominent. In recent years, the relevant departments of the Chinese government have successively issued a series of policies, which have further clarified the important supporting role of artificial intelligence in enhancing China's core competitiveness, coupled with the promotion of continuous favorable policies such as new infrastructure and digital economy, the Chinese intelligent market has maintained steady growth.
The scale of China's computing power, especially the scale of intelligent computing power, is growing rapidly. In 2021, China's intelligent computing power scale will reach 155.2 billion billion floating point operations per second (EFLOPS), in 2022 the scale of intelligent computing power will reach 268.0EFLOPS, and it is expected that by 2026, the scale of intelligent computing power will enter the level of 10 trillion trillion floating point calculations per second (ZFLOPS), reaching 1,271.4EFLOPS. In 2021, China's general computing power reached 47.7 EFLOPS, and it is expected that by 2026, the scale of general computing power will reach 111.3 EFLOPS. From 2021 to 2026, it is expected that the compound annual growth rate of China's intelligent computing power scale will be 52.3%, and the compound annual growth rate of general computing power scale in the same period will be 18.5%.
With the increasing role of digital infrastructure in government services, economic construction, people's livelihood security, social governance, etc., and with the high growth of artificial intelligence computing power demand, the Chinese government encourages the promotion of the inclusive development of digital public services, establishes and improves the digital infrastructure service system that helps businesses benefit the people, and promotes the development of computing power infrastructure.
In February 2022, the National Development and Reform Commission, together with the Cyberspace Administration of the Central Committee, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Energy Administration and other departments, launched the "East Data and West Calculation" project. The launch of the "East Data and West Computing" project and the construction of the intelligent computing center realize effective resource structure integration from the national level, help the adjustment of industrial structure, and build a more sound infrastructure structure through the upgrading of computing power infrastructure from point to network. At present, the state has started the construction of national computing power hub nodes in 8 places, including Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and has planned 10 national data center clusters to coordinate regional balanced development and promote the construction of intensive, green energy-saving, safe and stable computing power infrastructure. The Action Plan for Improving Enterprise Technology Innovation Capabilities (2022-2023) released in 2022 also mentions that the development of intelligent computing centers will be accelerated, with a view to providing low-cost computing power services to enterprises and promoting the infrastructure development of computing power.
In the development of the digital economy, computing power is an important support, and computing power as a core productivity has become a consensus. In 2018, Zhang Yunquan, a researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, proposed the concept of computing power economy, pointing out that the computing power economy with computing as the core will become a representative indicator to measure the development of a local digital economy and the main means of converting new and old kinetic energy, covering computing power infrastructure, computing power resources, computing power services and computing power applications. According to the data released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, every 1 yuan invested in computing power drives 3-4 yuan of economic output: for every 1 point increase in the computing power development index, GDP growth is about 129.3 billion yuan.
Similarly, by comparing the estimation results of Roland Berger with the results of IMD intelligence level assessment, it is found that the national classification results are basically consistent, so as to prove that the per capita computing power is positively correlated with the national intelligence level.
Therefore, it is important to accelerate the construction of computing power infrastructure, optimize the layout of computing power resources, support real-time and flexible scheduling and operation of cross-regional computing power networks, and improve the application intensity of computing power.
Computing power is the core productivity of the digital economy era, and the application of emerging technologies led by artificial intelligence has played an important role in the development of the digital economy, and the intelligent computing power used to support the application of artificial intelligence determines the realization of innovation. Whether it is a new scenario or a mature scenario, it poses great challenges to computing power, and enterprises that take the lead in deploying intelligent computing power will gain advantages in future competition.
References: "2022-2023 Chinese Intelligent Computing Power Development Assessment Report", "White Paper on the Development of New Computing Power Infrastructure under East Data and West Computing"