Exclusive | How Hong Kong intends to hit AI computing power goal and supercharge its start-up fund
- Tech minister Sun Dong outlines path towards establishing 15,000 petaflops and making Innovation and Technology Venture Fund more aggressive
Hong Kong’s technology minister has revealed plans to build up the city’s artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputing power and roll out a more “aggressive” version of a venture capital fund to attract fresh investment in start-ups.
Sun Dong, the secretary for innovation, technology and industry, told the Post he expected that private institutions in the coming Northern Metropolis would produce 10,000 petaflops of AI computing power by 2030, on top of the 3,000 petaflops provided by the AI Supercomputing Centre by the start of 2026 at the earliest.
A petaflop is a measurement of a computer’s speed and is equal to a quadrillion operations per second.
“It means a lot to Hong Kong. When we talk about AI development, we need to provide some basic infrastructure such as enough computing power,” Sun said. “For AI development, we need a lot of computing power to achieve our goal, to make the design, to train the data, to train the models and so on. These trainings will happen in the data centre based on the supercomputing power.
“Because of this very important infrastructure, we can attract international companies to come to Hong Kong to develop their businesses, to utilise our computing power.”
A government-commissioned study completed this year estimated the demand for computing power in Hong Kong would rise to 15,000 petaflops by 2030.