The following annual white paper by a Chinese state-run think tank analyzes the computing power landscape, in China and globally, as of late 2022. The report begins by summarizing global developments in compute over the past year, and then provides statistics on China’s compute industry. The authors find that, despite disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, China’s computing power growth outpaced the world average in 2022.

An archived version of the Chinese source text is available online at:    https://perma.cc/4GW2-UWDR

White Paper on China’s Computing Power Development Index (2022)¹

China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT)

November 2022

Preface

The importance of computing power (“compute”) has been elevated to new heights. As a new productive force (新的生产力) in the digital economy era, compute plays an important role in driving S&T progress, the digital transformation of industries, and economic and social development. While compute development is facing challenges from application diversification and the imbalance between supply and demand, the rise of new fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), digital twins, and the metaverse is driving the rapid growth of compute, the diversified innovation of computing technology, and the accelerated redrawing of the industrial landscape.

2021 was the opening year of the “14th Five-Year Plan” and the starting year of China’s construction of the new pattern of development (新发展格局). In the face of the complex and grave international environment, multiple pandemic outbreaks domestically, and many other tests, China’s compute development has achieved steady improvement. Overall, the following characteristics can be seen:

Compute scale continues to expand, and intelligent compute has become the main driving force. On the infrastructure side, China is rapidly deploying data centers and intelligent computing centers, with infrastructure compute reaching 140 exaflops (EFLOPS) in 2021, ranking China second in the world. The number of data center racks in use exceeded 5.2 million standard racks, and the number of intelligent computing centers already in operation approached 20, with over 20 more centers under construction. On the computing devices side, China shipped more than 19.6 million general purpose servers and 500,000 AI servers in the past six years, and the total scale of compute grew at a 50% rate to reach 202 EFLOPS, accounting for 33% of the global total. Intelligent compute (智能算力) in particular has maintained steady and rapid growth, with a growth rate reaching 85%.

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1. Translator’s note: The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) published its first White Paper on China’s Computing Power Development Index in 2021. An English translation of the 2021 version is available on CSET’s website at: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/white-paper-on-chinas-computing-power-development-index/.