China’s hi-tech push for computing power, AI gains must overcome glaring shortcomings, analysts say
- A dearth of critical supplies for AI development, exacerbated by Washington’s tech-curtailment moves against China, highlights need for a unified domestic market
- Beijing called on to boost financial support for computing industry and cultivate more talent in bid to ramp up nationwide services
Beijing needs to address deficiencies in the capacity build-up of computing power and coordinate regional and industrial resources to forge a nationwide network, according to analysts and industrial reports.
The reflection came amid Beijing’s aggressive push for the key infrastructure for future industries to close the gap with the US after OpenAI’s ChatGPT and newly released text-to-video model Sora ushered the world into a new era of artificial intelligence.
China is second only to the US in aggregated computing power and aims to scale up the computation capacity by half by 2025. But concerns have risen about a fragmented market, the lack of supply for AI development, and difficulties in developing indigenous computing power in the face of US bans on high-performance chips.
“We have yet to set up a unified market that is standard and inclusive. And we are also facing a dilemma between computing power shortage and low efficiency in usage,” Yu Xiaohui, head of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), was quoted as saying by Xinhua on Monday.
According to data released by International Data Corporation (IDC), the growth rate of China’s public computing investment declined from 66.55 per cent in 2019 to 13.2 per cent in the first half of 2023.