China has offered a glimpse at the processing power of its national compute capacity, and pointed to plans to grow it by 30 percent this year alone.
Details of China's current capacity emerged in recent days at the Global Digital Economy Conference 2024, where Wang Xiaoli, a representative of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, revealed that China has over 8.1 million datacenter racks in operation and that they house kit with combined processing power of 230 exaFLOPS.Just how China plans to add 70 more exaFLOPS to its national compute fleet in coming months wasn't discussed.
That opportunity is of course not available to many of the international businesses who could help China build that 70 exaFLOPS it wants in production in coming months. Wherever the kit needed to reach China's goal comes from, Beijing is touting the build as helping to transform its economy enabling wider deployment of AI workloads – and allowing rural areas to cash in on the boom in computing.