The digital and physical economies are merging, and the merger is demanding more computing power. As the key productive factor of the digital age, capacity has become the core support and the driver of digital growth.
The Global Computing Power Index Assessment Report 2021-2022, published by IDC, Inspur and Tsinghua University’s Institute for Global Industry, finds that each one-point rise in the index lifts the digital economy by 3.5 per mille and gross regional product by 1.8 per mille. Investment in capacity produces growth, and the growth is long-term and multiplicative. ‘Computing power plays a critical role in China’s growth,’ said Li Donghong, deputy director of the institute.
Inspur’s AI research institute estimates global capacity will be 30 times larger in 2025 than in 2020. As a new technological productive force, capacity is what unlocks the value of data and drives the digital economy.
Capacity is productivity. It is now a component of new infrastructure. Yang Yirui, a senior analyst at Zhongcheng Think Tank, argues that data and capacity have become both a new factor of production and a new productive resource, and one of the foundations of new industrial development. The national east-west transfer project, launched days ago, opens the digital artery between China’s east and west and allows data resources, capacity, digital industry and digital services to be laid out sensibly.
‘Capacity is not only productivity, it is creativity — computing is crossing over into intelligent computing,’ said Peng Zhen, president of Inspur. Capacity and algorithms are the core of an intelligent computing centre: first-rate intelligence needs first-rate algorithms, and algorithms in turn need leading capacity to run efficiently. Infrastructure for capacity and infrastructure for algorithms go together.
Capacity infrastructure is built around capacity as a service: a scheduling operating system in the intelligent computing centre allocates it and serves it outward, the way utilities supply water and power. Algorithm infrastructure means deploying the training, inference and data-processing systems a large model needs inside the centre — language models, vision models, multimodal models — and offering algorithm services in various forms, so that algorithms reach ordinary users and industry applications can be developed faster.
Where the spending goes
The report finds the global pattern already set: the US and China lead, and their dominance has strengthened.
By sector, the top five are internet, finance, manufacturing, telecom and government. Buyers are raising capacity spending, with AI capacity taking the largest share of the increase, and the sectors that spend most on capacity are also the ones investing most in new technology.
AI capacity is forecast to rise from 9% of total capacity spending in 2016 to 25% in 2025, with Chinese spending on AI servers growing sharply. Edge computing, a platform technology, carries 5G, the internet of things, robotics and AI. Over the next five years investment at the edge will grow much faster than at the core: edge servers will go from 14.4% of total server spending to 24.9% by 2025.
IDC puts China’s 2021 server market at USD 25.09 billion, up 12.7% year on year and the fastest-growing region, with a 25.3% share of the global market, up 1.4 points, and 3.911 million units shipped, up 8.4%. In China, Inspur held 31.4% and first place; globally it ranked second.
Republished for information. The original text has not been independently verified and does not necessarily reflect our views.
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