2023 China Computational Conference kicks off in Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui autonomous region, on Saturday. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

China's top industry regulator said on Saturday that it will introduce new policies to promote the high-quality development of computing power infrastructure, further strengthen top-level design and enhance the comprehensive supply capacity of computing power.

Jin Zhuanglong, the minister of Industry and Information Technology, said: "Computing power has become a key productivity in the digital economy era and an important cornerstone of the digital and intelligent transformation of the entire society."

Jin called for more efforts to promote infrastructure construction, advance the intelligent and green transformation of the computing power industry, and promote the deep integration of technologies, so as to provide strong support for building a strong manufacturing country and digital China.

According to him, China's total computing power reached 197 EFLOPS by the end of last year, ranking second in the world after the United States. EFLOPS is a unit of the speed of computer systems, equal to one quintillion floating-point operations a second.

Jin made the remarks at the opening ceremony of 2023 China Computational Conference in Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui autonomous region.

The comments also came as China's computing power industry is expected to usher in new development opportunities for major Chinese tech companies that have rolled out ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence chatbots, which necessitates higher requirements for computing capacity in the process of large language model training.

Zhang Yunming, vice-minister of Industry and Information Technology, said by focusing on the development needs of computing power, more efforts will be made in enhancing independent innovation capabilities in areas such as computing architecture and computing algorithms, and in strengthening the research and development of key products such as CPUs, GPUs and servers.

According to calculations by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the scale of China's core computing power industry reached 1.8 trillion yuan ($251 billion) in 2022. Every 1 yuan invested in computing power will drive economic growth of 3 to 4 yuan in GDP.

Yang Jie, chairman of China Mobile. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Yang Jie, chairman of China Mobile, said the company is building the largest single body intelligent computing center in Asia, with a computing power scale of 5EFLOPS and a 10000 chip AI acceleration chip.

China Mobile has accelerated the upgrading of its computing infrastructure and built the most advanced East Data West Computing artery in China, covering a total distance of 5,600 kilometers from Ningbo, Zhejiang to Gui'an, Guizhou, achieving a world record for ultra-long-distance transmission of 400G optical network.