China seeks 30% growth in national compute capacity by 2025

“In April, we also partnered with Tesla to apply their Megapack energy storage technology at our intelligent computing center,” Yan Gang, technical director of Yovole Network, a Shanghai-based cloud computing data center service provider, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

Technology trade war with the US

The partnership with Tesla as well China’s plans to increase its national compute capacity citing economic development may not sit well with the US, which has actively tried to stop the former from garnering technology prowess in advanced areas such as chip-making, artificial intelligence (AI), and quantum computing.

In October last year, the US imposed additional export curbs to restrict China from accessing advanced chips for AI, data centers, and supercomputers, expanding a technology trade war that has intensified over the last year, broadly impacting the global semiconductor supply chain.

The US — which began to impose restrictions on semiconductor exports to China in 2015, extending them in 2021 and twice in 2022 — had said that it would soon impose additional license requirements on exports to more than 40 additional countries that present a heightened risk for export diversion to China.

China ranks second after the US in compute capacity, according to CAICT. The US is expected to have reached 200 exaFLOPS in 2022, it added.

Earlier in May, China launched an ambitious three-year plan to establish itself as a global leader in AI and computing standards.