China seeks 30% growth in national compute capacity by 2025

China has released a plan that reveals the oriental power’s plans to grow its national compute capacity to 30% by 2025.

The plan, which was reported by several Chinese news outlets after its release by six state departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, reveals that the country aims to reach 300 exaFLOPS by 2025.

Last year in August, the ministry revealed that the country had reached a national compute capacity of 197 exaFLOPS, up from 180 exaFLOPS in 2022.

Separately, another state-owned outlet on Sunday quoted one official from China’s Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) saying that the country’s total computing capacity in 2024 had reached 230 exaFLOPS during a conference on digital economy.

If the official is to be believed, China has successfully increased its compute capacity by 33 exaFLOPS in just 11 months. The target to increase its capacity further by 70 units within the next 12 months approximately indicates a sizeable acceleration.

These reports from state-owned outlets also indicate that the rapid increase in capacity was supported by the adoption of advanced energy management technologies, some of which were drawn post a partnership with US-headquartered electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla in April.

“In April, we also partnered with Tesla to apply their Megapack energy storage technology at our intelligent computing center,” Yan Gang, technical director of Yovole Network, a Shanghai-based cloud computing data center service provider, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

Technology trade war with the US

The partnership with Tesla as well China’s plans to increase its national compute capacity citing economic development may not sit well with the US, which has actively tried to stop the former from garnering technology prowess in advanced areas such as chip-making, artificial intelligence (AI), and quantum computing.

In October last year, the US imposed additional export curbs to restrict China from accessing advanced chips for AI, data centers, and supercomputers, expanding a technology trade war that has intensified over the last year, broadly impacting the global semiconductor supply chain.

The US — which began to impose restrictions on semiconductor exports to China in 2015, extending them in 2021 and twice in 2022 — had said that it would soon impose additional license requirements on exports to more than 40 additional countries that present a heightened risk for export diversion to China.

China ranks second after the US in compute capacity, according to CAICT. The US is expected to have reached 200 exaFLOPS in 2022, it added.

Earlier in May, China launched an ambitious three-year plan to establish itself as a global leader in AI and computing standards.

The initiative, “Action Plan for Information Standard Construction (2024-2027),” outlines a comprehensive strategy to strengthen China’s position in the ongoing tech race with the US and other nations, an official document showed.

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