A bone surgery robot is demonstrated at a medical facility in Beijing on August 6, 2025, highlighting the integration of AI and robotics in precision healthcare. Photo: VCG

In 2025, China's intelligent computing power is expected to grow by over 40 percent on a yearly basis, according to industry forecast released at the 2025 China Computing Power Conference, which concluded on Sunday. Industry practitioners said the demand for intelligent computing power is surging, fueled by rapid artificial intelligence (AI) advancements in the country.

Analysts said China's computing power industry is entering a new stage of high-quality and large-scale development. The projected 40 percent growth in intelligent computing power in 2025 signifies rapid progress in AI capabilities, supporting innovation across industries. It also highlighted China's focus on advancing AI technology to boost economic competitiveness, scientific research, and digital transformation, they said.

As the foundation of AI advancement, computing power is a key arena in the global race for technological advancement, with China surging forward at an extraordinary pace, Zhang Xiaorong, director of the Beijing-based Cutting-Edge Technology Research Institute, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Broadly understood as the capacity to process data, computing power encompasses infrastructure and technologies that enable data computation, storage, and network capabilities in the digital economy, according to Zhang.

"The surge in the scale of computing power means that a significant shift is unfolding: AI is no longer limited to research labs or city centers but is swiftly spreading across Chinese society. Driving this AI transformation is a critical yet often unseen force: computing power," said Zhang.

Rapid growth

Data from the conference, held from Friday to Sunday, showed that China's total computing power has grown at an annual rate of about 30 percent, according to a report by CCTV News on Sunday.

By the end of June, China's total computing power ranked second worldwide, Liu Liehong, head of the National Data Administration (NDA), told a press conference on August 14.

Xiong Jijun, deputy minister of industry and information technology, said at the computing power conference that as of June 2025, China's intelligent computing power reached 788 EFLOPS (indicates system speed, equals one quintillion floating-point calculations per second).

This represented significant increase in the scale of intelligent computing power, which stood at 90 EFLOPS by the end of 2024. Intelligent computing power accounted for 32 percent of China's total computing capacity of 280 EFLOPS in 2024, according to data from the NDA released in April.

The rising demand of computing power partly came from an increasingly expanding scope of applications in China. So far, intelligent computing applications span generative AI models, autonomous driving, low-altitude economy, embodied intelligence, smart cities, and industrial manufacturing, Wang Peng, associate research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Over 23,000 innovative computing projects have been collected through computing power application competitions, with large-scale adoption in industries such as finance, healthcare, and energy, according to CCTV News, citing information released at the computing power conference.

"These innovative projects demonstrated China's commitment to leveraging intelligent computing for high-quality development. And the potential for intelligent computing power is vast, particularly in areas such as healthcare, education, and agriculture," said Wang.

For example, in healthcare, AI-driven medical imaging accelerates accurate diagnoses, assisting doctors effectively, Wang said.

"In education, personalized learning systems customize content based on student progress, while VR and AR create immersive learning environments, both requiring robust computing support. In agriculture, precision farming integrates diverse data for optimized planting, and agricultural robots rely on intelligent computing for tasks like harvesting, driving significant demand," Wang said.

Improving infrastructure

The growing demand of computing power also demonstrate the advancement of China's computing infrastructure, supporting its digital economy and AI-driven innovation with robust, scalable, and efficient systems, Wang said.

Currently, China's national computing power platform is accelerating development, with 10 provincial platforms now integrated, according to CCTV news, citing information revealed at the 2025 China Computing Power Conference.

Research data showed that in 2025, the investment in computing power by domestic operators will maintain a growth rate of over 20 percent. The AI investment of leading internet enterprises in the next three years will exceed 500 billion yuan ($69.8 billion), which brings a broad space for the construction of information and communications technology infrastructure, Xie Junshi, executive vice president and COO of ZTE, was quoted as saying by the Xinhua News Agency in May.

Xiong said at the conference that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) is aiming to optimize intelligent computing infrastructure to meet the needs of emerging and future industries, while effectively enhancing the quality of computing resource supply.

"The ministry will strengthen the supply-demand matching of computing resources across regions and industries, build a computing power interconnection system, and promote complementarity and coordinated interaction between the eastern and western regions," said Xiong.

According to Xiong, the MIIT will accelerate breakthroughs in key core technologies such as GPU chips, and expand the supply of basic common technologies.

Zhang highlighted the reinforcing cycle of computing power, chips, and AI. "AI applications fuel demand for computing power, which relies on advanced chip performance (driven by process and architecture innovations). In turn, chip advancements enable more powerful AI and efficient computing, creating a catalytic loop where each component accelerates the others' evolution," said Zhang.

Given the close relationship between computing power, chip and AI, DeepSeek's newly announced DeepSeek-V3.1 model was also discussed at the computing power conference, chinastarmarket.cn reported on Sunday.

On Thursday, in the comment section of its WeChat account article announcing its DeepSeek-V3.1 model on Thursday, DeepSeek stated, "UE8M0 FP8 is tailored for the upcoming next-generation domestic chip."

Explaining what is FP8, Chen Zhi, AI Infra Director at Moore Threads, a Chinese GPU and AI-accelerator start-up, told chinastarmarket.cn at the conference that previously, AI models used FP32 (32-bit) and later FP16 (16-bit) to reduce storage and communication costs. "FP8 further compresses data to 8 bits, doubling computing efficiency and cutting network bandwidth needs. This enables larger model training or faster processing under the same power constraints," Chen said.

However, FP8's smaller numerical range can cause errors in precision-sensitive tasks like accumulation. Thus, hybrid precision training is used, dynamically selecting precision to balance speed and accuracy, chinastarmarket.cn reported, citing an anonymous industry insider at the conference.

Analysts noted that since the beginning of this year, open-source models represented by DeepSeek have sparked a new round of discussions in the industry regarding the evolution of computing power demand.

Regardless of the function of DeepSeek's new model, one thing is for sure: the digital economy has also become a new driving force for China's economic development, through forming an ecosystem characterized by deep data mining, integrated applications, advanced algorithms, and high computing power, they stressed.

"By 2035, AI is projected to contribute over 11 trillion yuan to China's GDP, accounting for approximately 4-5 percent of GDP. This could drive computing power demand to increase by tenfold or even a hundredfold," Rao Shaoyang, director at the China Telecom Research Institute, said at the conference.