Deft push to develop big data, computing power industries

When I visited Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province, to cover the China International Big Data Industry Expo 2025 last month, I was amazed by the mountainous province's efforts to establish digital infrastructure, including data centers and intelligent computing centers.

Guizhou, known for its karst landforms, has been dubbed China's big data hub. It is the country's first national big data comprehensive pilot zone and has been promoting the big data industry as the backbone of the province's high-quality social and economic development.

The province boasts numerous advantages in developing the big data and computing power industries, such as a cooler climate and ample power resources. China's three telecom giants — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — as well as Huawei, Tencent and NetEase have established their intelligent computing and data centers in Gui'an New Area in Guiyang.

After a decade of development, Guizhou is currently home to 49 key data centers, either under construction or in operation. The province's total computing power reached 92.6 EFlops, with intelligent computing accounting for nearly 97 percent of the total, positioning Gui'an New Area as one of China's strongest regions for domestically developed intelligent computing capabilities.

An EFlop is a unit that measures the speed of computer systems and is equal to 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second.

In the past, most data centers in Guizhou were primarily focused on storage. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the province is developing intelligent computing. Notably, over 40 percent of the special effects shots in the popular animated film Ne Zha 2 were rendered using computing power generated in Guizhou.

The Gui'an Supercomputing Center, which was put into operation at the end of 2020, boasts more than 700 servers and offers high-performance computing support for fields such as film rendering. The center has provided post-rendering services for over 100 films and TV productions, with the average server utilization rate exceeding 80 percent.

China has launched a megaproject involving the construction of eight national computing hubs and 10 national data center clusters, indicating that its work to channel more computing resources from the country's eastern regions to less developed yet resource-rich western regions is in full swing. Guizhou is among eight national computing hubs, with Gui'an New Area included in the 10 national data centers.

Xu Lin, Party secretary of Guizhou, said at the expo that the province will seize the strategic opportunity brought on by the explosive growth of AI to vigorously develop the computing power industry, with a key focus on intelligent computing, as well as develop the data industry and AI industry centered on industry-specific large models.

More efforts will be made to develop the electronic information industry, with an emphasis on fostering industries such as electronic components, computing hardware manufacturing and intelligent terminal manufacturing, he said.

Experts told me that computing power serves as an important engine driving the development of new quality productive forces and unleashing the potential of data as a factor of production. The demand for computing power has been surging ever since US-based research firm OpenAI launched its AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022, taking the world by storm.

Yu Xiaohui, head of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said most of China's computing infrastructure is distributed in the eastern regions, while the western regions have the potential to foster the development of data centers and meet the needs of data computing in the eastern regions.

Yu said the implementation of the "East-Data-West-Computing "project is conducive to optimizing the allocation of national computing power, utilizing green energy in western regions, improving the energy efficiency of data centers and nurturing emerging digital industries.

"With the rapid development and the commercial application of 5G, the internet of things, AI and the industrial internet, demand for data processing is increasing, which has driven the construction of intelligent computing power infrastructure," said Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Zhongguancun Modern Information Consumer Application Industry Technology Alliance, a telecom industry association.

Chinese high-tech companies should utilize innovative technologies to improve data centers and the operational efficiency of computing power centers, as well as reduce power and energy consumption, Xiang said.