China and the path to the transformation of the digital economy

China’s remarkable progress in computing power, or the ability to process data, has laid a solid foundation for its transition to the digital economy.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the Asian country’s total computing power is now second in the world. At the end of June, the number of data center racks in use exceeded 5.9 million, and the number of servers reached nearly 20 million in China.

Furthermore, as of the end of June, China had 1.85 million 5G base stations and more than 450 million 5G end users.

Zhang Yunming, Vice Minister of MIIT, has stated on several occasions that the faster digital transformation of society and the economy created a strong demand for computing power, thus providing a unique historical opportunity to develop the computing power sector.

In 2021, the market scale of the sector exceeded 1.5 trillion yuan (about 222.5 billion US dollars), while the number of super-large and large data centers in use exceeded 450 nationwide, and the number of data centers of intelligent computing exceeded 20, according to MIIT.

The rapid growth in computing infrastructure came amid China’s push to develop its digital economy, which grew from 11 trillion yuan in 2012 to more than 45 trillion in 2021.

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China viewed computing power as a new type of productivity, a vital foundation for the development of the digital economy, and a new engine for unleashing the potential of data as a factor of production. It also promotes the digital transformation of the economy and society and promotes the construction of a digital government.

The Asian giant wants all industries to follow the trends of digitization and has called for accelerating the construction of computing infrastructure, boosting innovation in the computing power industry, and enhancing coordinated and open cooperation between sectors.

At the national level, a megaproject was launched in February that includes the creation of eight national computing centers in the country and ten national clusters of data centers to improve global computing power. This is an important underpinning for the development of China’s digital economy.

By creating a national network of computing power, the project will help less developed regions with abundant renewable energy resources to store and process data transmitted from economically advanced areas to cope with growing demand and capacity imbalance. regional.

At present, computing power has been widely applied in fields such as the industrial Internet, smart health care, financial technology, distance education, and aerospace.

Faced with the impact of multiple factors, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, this year many Chinese manufacturing companies have turned to the industrial Internet and relevant applications to boost supply chain stability.

A report by e-commerce consultancy Ebrun and the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing showed that more than 70% of companies surveyed have started shopping online.

Last year, China’s cloud computing market exceeded 300 billion yuan, according to an estimate by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

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Going forward, China will make more efforts to build a new information infrastructure system based on a new generation of communication networks, with data facilities and computing power at the core and a breakthrough focus on convergence infrastructure.

The Chinese government has also stressed the need to strengthen innovation in the computing power sector by promoting the establishment of computing power standards, such as those related to new data centers and large industrial data centers.

Finally, China will focus on meeting the demand for digital economic development and deepening the integration between computing power and sectors such as public administration, industrial production and medical care.