Southwest China's Guizhou province is ramping up efforts to accelerate the construction of computing infrastructure, including intelligent computing centers and data centers, as part of its broader drive to improve efficiency in the use of computing resources and inject fresh impetus into the country's digital economy.

Computing power, which serves as a core productive force in the digital economy era, has become an important engine driving China's economic growth and unleashing the potential of data as a factor of production, experts said.

They further said the demand for computing power has been surging ever since US-based research firm OpenAI launched its chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022, taking the world by storm.

Jing Yaping, director of the Big Data Development Administration of Guizhou, said the province will take steps to bolster the construction of intelligent computing centers, expand the application scenarios of large language models or LLMs in more vertical industries, and attract more enterprises engaged in data annotation, governance and training to Guizhou.

She noted that at present, demand for computing capacity, especially intelligent computing, is witnessing explosive growth along with technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence-powered LLMs.

That apart, the province has made great efforts to improve the basic systems for data by introducing a series of policy measures, promote the circulation and trading of data, and build up data center clusters so as to unleash the massive value of data elements, Jing said.

It has established the country's first big data exchange, the Global Big Data Exchange, in Guiyang, to bolster the flow and transaction of data resources across the country, and to make data transactions more regulated and market-oriented. The annual turnover of data circulation and transactions in the province is expected to surpass 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) by the end of 2025.

Often dubbed China's big data hub, the mountainous province of Guizhou is China's first national big data comprehensive pilot zone. It has been promoting the big data industry as the backbone of its high-quality social and economic development in recent years.

China has launched a megaproject involving the construction of eight national computing hubs and 10 national data center clusters, indicating that its work to channel more computing resources from the country's eastern regions to less developed yet resource-rich western regions is in full swing. Guizhou is among eight national computing hubs, with Gui'an New Area in the provincial capital Guiyang, included in the 10 national data centers.

Tech companies from home and abroad, such as China's three telecom giants — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — Apple Inc, Huawei Technologies Co and Tencent Holdings Ltd have all established their data centers in Gui'an New Area.

These data centers store companies' crucial data resources and provide stable computing power support. So far, Gui'an New Area boasts 20 intelligent computing centers, with 10 data centers put into operation.

China has unveiled an implementation plan to accelerate the construction of a national computing power network. The plan, jointly released by the National Data Administration and four other central government departments, said the country will form a preliminary comprehensive computing power infrastructure system by the end of 2025.

Most of China's computing infrastructure is distributed in the eastern regions, while the western regions have the potential to foster the development of data centers and meet the needs of data computing in the eastern regions, said Yu Xiaohui, head of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

Yu said the implementation of the east-data-west-computing project is conducive to optimizing the allocation of national computing power, utilizing green energy in the western regions, improving the energy efficiency of data centers and nurturing emerging digital industries.

"With the rapid development and the commercial application of 5G, the internet of things, AI and the industrial internet, demand for data processing is increasing, which has driven the construction of computing power infrastructure," said Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Information Consumption Alliance, a telecom industry association.

He noted building a national computing power network will enable the western regions to handle and store data transmitted from the eastern areas, and resolve excessive data surges and imbalances in regional computing capacity, adding that Chinese high-tech companies should utilize innovative technologies to improve data centers' operational efficiency and cut power and energy consumption.