Guizhou province in Southwest China has emerged as a national computing network hub. There is now ample evidence to show that the "east data, west computing" project, which means "computing the eastern region's data in the west" of the country, encompasses not only technology transfer, but also the restructuring of production. Guizhou is evolving from being a follower to a leader in the field of computing, setting a new paradigm for other western provinces in China.

Since being designated as a national computing power hub in May 2021, Guizhou has made giant strides in expanding its computing power. By late 2024, its gross computing power had doubled, exceeding 57 EFLOPS (57 quintillion floating-point operations per second), among which intelligent computing accounts for over 90 percent, transforming Guizhou into one of the top intelligent-computing provinces in China.

With clustered intelligent computing centers, including the Huawei Ascend Computing Center, Guizhou has transformed itself from being a "data storage warehouse" to becoming a "computing engine".

With a considerable number of data centers, Guizhou is poised to build an industry chain centered on computing power and data.

Guizhou has issued 26 incentive policies to promote its development as a national computing hub, and expanded the scope of incentives to attract enterprises from regions such as Guangdong and Sichuan provinces and Beijing to start computing-related businesses in the province. It is planned that it will continually expand its computing capacity based on the clustered data centers in Gui'an and aggregate resources and computing power.

By late 2024, Guizhou had provided 23 percent of the country's total computing power, and had completed computing transactions worth 11.35 billion yuan ($1.56 billion). It is currently developing diverse application scenarios, and actively cultivating clustered data centers, intelligent terminals and data applications — all with the aim of all three reaching a scale of 100 billion yuan respectively.

Innovation has replaced resources as the province's primary driving force. Application scenarios have stimulated demand and services. In recent years, Guizhou's computing power has gained popularity among film-making teams in eastern regions. The major operator of the Gui'an Supercomputing Center has helped render more than 50 films including The Wandering Earth, Deep Sea and The Three-Body Problem. Notably, over 40 percent of the special effects shots in the popular animated film Ne Zha 2 were rendered using computing power generated in Guizhou.

Nevertheless, Guizhou still faces challenges, namely, insufficient endogenous technological advancement, shortage of high-end talents and poor regional coordination. For this reason, Guizhou is sparing no effort to cultivate local innovative teams through projects such as "scientist workstations" and "university-enterprise joint laboratories". The Gui'an Supercomputing Center, for example, has supported research computing for universities and research institutes in Guizhou in fields such as biomedicine, artificial intelligence and industrial simulation.

The province's financial authorities guide financial institutions to enhance coordination between the government, finance, and enterprises, thereby assisting sci-tech businesses to secure finance and foster innovation. By last September, the province had 11 bank branches specializing in sci-tech financing, with outstanding loans to technology-based enterprises totaling 99.84 billion yuan, an increase of 2.32 billion yuan compared to early 2024. Notably, loans to high-tech enterprises amounted to 83.38 billion yuan, up 29.82 percent from the start of 2024.

If Guizhou achieves its goal of building China's largest computing clusters by the end of 2025 as planned, it is poised to become a prominent player in the global digital economy, and better support the country's modernization.