BEIJING: Amid the global race to build artificial general intelligence, the development of more powerful computing power has become a major focus of China’s strategic initiatives, driven by the needs of a fast-growing digital economy and innovations in large language models.
Data revealed at the Global Digital Economy Conference 2024, which ended Friday in Beijing, showed that by the end of last year, the total number of standard racks used in data centers across the country in China exceeded 8.1 million with total computing power. 230 EFLOPS. EFLOPS is a unit of measurement used to determine the speed of a computer. A 1 EFLOPS computing system can complete 1 quintillion floating point operations per second.
In the era of connected devices and data growth, computing power as the “new energy” of the digital economy is reshaping the global economic landscape at an unprecedented pace, Wang Xiaoli, who is a fellow of the Chinese Academy of Information and Communication Technology, told the conference.
According to a plan released by six ministries in October 2023, China wants to increase the country’s total computing power by more than 30 percent by 2025. The plan also sets a target for China’s total computing power to reach 300 EFLOPS by 2025. .
During this process, computing systems and data centers require significant electricity to operate and cool the hardware, so energy efficiency is a critical consideration in computing power development.
In order to meet the growing energy demands, China’s related industries have made extensive efforts to integrate the development of green energy with computing power. At the just-concluded conference, Yan Gang, CTO of Yovole Network, a Shanghai-based cloud data center service provider, outlined its strategy for efficient energy storage using advanced energy management technologies.
“Our smart computing center uses combined cooling, heating and power systems using hydrogen energy, photovoltaic storage, indirect evaporative cooling and liquid cooling technologies. We also partnered with Tesla in April to use their Megapack energy storage technology in our smart computing center. Yan said.
Meanwhile, with strong demand for computing power, China’s eastern regions have shared opportunities for development in the digital era with the rest of the country.
