(Yicai Global) April 18 -- China's science and technology ministry has initiated the establishment of a national supercomputing internet consortium to build a supercomputing internet because the demand for computing power has increased with the development of generative artificial intelligence.

The new consortium will form an overall layout with advanced technologies, innovative models, premium services, and an all-around ecosystem by 2025, the ministry said at a launch event held in Tianjin yesterday.

The supercomputing internet will run supercomputing centers via the internet of thinking and connect all such centers nationwide through a computing power network to build an integrated computing power services platform.

China should speed up its transformation to better meet the new development needs through a single supercomputing center with ultra-strong computing power, Guo Liang, deputy chief engineer at the Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Institute of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, told Yicai Global.

Interconnecting supercomputing centers and building a national integrated supercomputing infrastructure are necessary to deal with mass computing needs, and cultivating an industrial ecosystem and exploring business models are crucial for integrated computing power platforms to provide services, Guo added.

China's computing power industry was worth CNY2.6 trillion (USD378.5 billion) in 2021, bringing direct and indirect economic outputs of CNY2.2 trillion and CNY8.2 trillion, respectively.

As core drivers of the digital economy’s development, global data volume and computing power continue to grow quickly. Every CNY1 (15 US cents) spent on computing power brings between CNY3 and CNY4 in economic output, according to estimations from the CAICT.

Digital infrastructure and service platforms have developed more quickly in recent years. China's general computing power quadrupled between 2016 and 2020, with an almost 10,000 percent gain in smart computing power over the period, CAICT data showed.

“China leads the US for supercomputing center numbers, but still lags behind the US in terms of computing infrastructure, meaning it still needs more high-quality data centers," Xu Feng from the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China told Yicai Global.

Editors: Shi Yi, Futura Costaglione