China plans to increase its computer processing power by 50% by 2025, the country's top ministry announced on Monday. It is China's current determination to maintain their level with the United States in artificial intelligence and supercomputer applications.
The world's second largest economy wants to have a processing capacity equal to 300 exaflops. This would represent an increase from the 197 exaflop processing capacity that the country currently has.
One exaflop, or EFLOP, refers to a unit of processing power. For this context, one exaflop is equivalent to the processing power of two million laptops, according to Counterpoint Research.
The Chinese ministry said that this increase in processing power will be needed to support applications in industries including finance and education. The increase in processing power is considered important to support the development of artificial intelligence that requires advanced semiconductors to process large amounts of data.
This investment reflects China's desire to drive economic output through leadership in technological capabilities and integrating artificial intelligence with existing technologies and solutions in all industries and domains.
Technologies such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence have become key battlegrounds in the technological competition between the United States and China.
As part of this computer processing effort, China wants to focus on areas such as memory storage and networks to transmit data, and also plans to build more data centers.
This is necessary for cloud computing players to expand their reach. Many artificial intelligence applications are currently sold through cloud computing services, such as those offered by Alibaba and Tencent.
