China amps up calls for ‘unified’ computing network to empower e-commerce and underpin AI
- Boosting computational power is critical to China’s new infrastructure drive, and leaders want network access to be as common as water and electricity utilities
- Expanded computer networks could help China develop semiconductor chips, process e-payments and better harness artificial intelligence such as chatbots
A Communist Party mouthpiece is calling for the creation of a unified network of computing hardware that would span the entire country and make the utility as accessible and ubiquitous as water or electricity while supercharging the world’s second-largest digital economy.
And in turn, it said, thousands of industries would be able to “provide better solutions for high-quality economic and social development”.
“By connecting large and small power resources across the country to form a unified dispatched computing power network, computing power can be connected … and used immediately, like water and electricity,” it added.
Government officials aim to link up existing hardware from supercomputing centres to private office-based systems so users can do more computations, including in the cloud, analysts believe.