Computing power plays a growing role in economic and social development. Data has become a new factor of production, and computing power is what turns that data into value — the force behind digital transformation in almost every sector. In recent years China’s computing capacity has risen quickly and is now applied deeply in internet, finance, telecom and transport, where it drives both technology and application innovation.
Capacity keeps rising
As economies digitise, governments have made computing power a strategic priority. Zheng Weimin, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, describes the computing economy as one in which data is the key factor of production and computing power the core productive force; its pull on industrial upgrading has made it a new focus of global competition. China has issued a run of measures to build new infrastructure around computing and networks, and the US, Europe, Japan and Australia are moving in the same direction.
The Global Computing Power Index Assessment Report 2021-2022, compiled by IDC, Inspur and the Institute for Global Industry at Tsinghua University, finds that each one-point rise in the computing power index lifts the digital economy by 3.5 per mille and GDP by 1.8 per mille.
The report argues the return is long-term and multiplicative. Once a country’s index passes 40 points, each further point adds 1.5 times as much lift to GDP growth; past 60 points, 3.0 times.
China has pushed hard on the digital economy and on new infrastructure — 5G, industrial internet, data centres and artificial intelligence. In May 2021 the National Development and Reform Commission and four other departments issued an implementation plan for a national integrated big data centre system; in July the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published a three-year action plan for new data centres covering 2021 to 2023; in November it released the 14th Five-Year Plan for the information and communications sector, which names computing capacity as a key task.
Under that push, and with industry effort behind it, capacity has grown quickly. The report puts the US first on 77 points and China second on 70, both in the leading group; seven countries including Japan, Germany, the UK and France sit in the 40 to 55 band, and six including India, Italy and Brazil are below 40.
Reaching industry
As computing merges with networks and data, it is heading the way of water and electricity: a basic service that supplies computing resources to the whole of society and carries industry through digital transformation.
Where is it landing first? The report puts internet, finance, manufacturing, telecom and government in the global top five, and finds that the sectors spending most on computing are also the ones spending most on new technology. Internet companies have been quickest to adopt emerging technology; finance is automating to support new products; manufacturing is building smart factories; telecom uses computing investment to improve internal management and to power new external services.
Some argue manufacturing cannot digitise without computing capacity first. Ministry of Industry and Information Technology figures put the numerical-control rate on key processes in large industrial firms at 55.3%, the penetration of digital R&D tools at 74.7%, and the number of industrial enterprises served by industrial internet platforms above 1.6 million. Machines in their millions generate data that has to be stored, processed and fed back into production decisions, and none of that runs without capacity behind it.
More sectors are finding they need it. At this year’s Two Sessions, SAIC chairman Chen Hong argued that a strong and stable automotive supply chain depends on the chip segment, and called for policy support for domestic high-computing-power chips. The industry reads computing efficiency as a main driver of smart vehicles: where L2 autonomy needs under 10 TOPS, L4 needs more than 100 TOPS and L5 may need more than 1,000.
In a digital economy, computing power has become the core productive force of the information society. As more industries digitise, demand will keep growing, network build-out will keep accelerating, and the technology and its applications will keep maturing — all of it feeding back into higher-quality growth.
Republished for information. The original text has not been independently verified and does not necessarily reflect our views.
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