(Yicai Global) Aug. 1 -- China will continue to promote the computational power industry, which is already the second largest in the world, by accelerating the building of infrastructure, advancing innovation and other means, the deputy minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said at the weekend.

The Chinese government will speed up construction of computing power infrastructure and focus on setting up a new information infrastructure system that is based on next-generation communication networks, with data and computing power facilities at its core, Zhang Yunming said at the China Computation Power Conference in eastern Shandong province.

The MIIT will accelerate breakthroughs in high-end chips, new types of data centers, supercomputing and other areas to advance innovation, Zhang said. And it will promote the formulation of technical standards and deepen the integration of computational power with government affairs, industry, medical care and other areas, he added.

China’s computational power tallies around 150 Exa floating point operations per second, with over 5.9 million standard data center racks in use that housing about 20 million servers, Zhang said.

The sector was worth over CNY1.5 trillion (USD222.1 billion) last year, of which cloud computing made up CNY300 billion (USD44.4 billion) and artificial intelligence CNY400 billion, the MIIT's China Academy of Information and Communications Technology said. It has grown by an average of over 30 percent each year over the last five years.

Computational power is driving the digital transformation of an increasing number of industries. There are more than 20,000 applications in fifth-generation wireless networks, it is applied across over 150 industrial internet platforms and connects 79 million pieces of equipment.

Guangdong province, Shanghai and Jiangsu province are the three provincial-level regions with the biggest computing power, according to the country’s first computing power index which was released at the conference. All three lie in the east of China, where most of the country's computer power hubs are located.

The world's largest network infrastructure for leading technologies has been built, Zhang said. China had 1.9 million 5G base stations as of the end of June, with over 450 million users of 5G cellphones and 61 million subscribers to gigabit fiber.

Editors: Shi Yi, Kim Taylor