China intends to go “all in” in the world of supercomputing. So much so, that a new report made public this week suggests that the Asian giant would be doing everything possible to increase its computing capabilities by no less than 50% by the year 2025, with the aim of reach a total of 300 ExaFLOPS. It is currently estimated that the aggregate processing capacity barely exceeds 197 ExaFLOPS.
This initiative is part of China’s national strategy to remain competitive in the high technology sector, especially in artificial intelligence (AI) and high performance computing (HPC) and started almost a year ago when the communist government, through six of his main ministries, announced his ambitious plan to dramatically increase the country’s computing power.
Well-known companies such as Alibaba and Tencent could in this sense be the big beneficiaries of a plan that foresees significant investments in the development of technologies to improve memory storage, data transmission infrastructure and the construction of new data centers.
Although these developments are crucial for cloud computing services, an area in which many AI solutions are currently commercialized, experts doubt that the country will be able to equip itself with the tools it needs to launch more than 100 ExaFLOPS of computational capacity in such a short time. Not when the country remains exposed to severe sanctions that reduce its ability to obtain key components on the market.
It is worth remembering at this point that the United States has imposed sanctions that have affected China’s technological supply chain, especially access to AI and HPC CPUs and GPUs from companies such as AMD, Intel and Nvidia.
And while it’s true that SMIC, the leading Chinese chipmaker, can build fairly sophisticated application processors for smartphones, they don’t have the capacity to build something as advanced as the latest developments from Nvidia or Intel. In this sense, at least in the short and even medium term, the Asian country will continue to encounter an almost insurmountable obstacle here if its ambition is to lead the artificial intelligence race.
At the other extreme, historical data suggests that China’s investments in IT infrastructure generate substantial economic returns for the country’s economy. For every yuan spent on improving its capabilities in this field, the country has seen an economic increase of three to four yuan, according to Akshara Bassi, senior research analyst at Counterpoint.
