By Li Panpan

(JW Insights) Aug 21 -- China's total computing power has reached 197 EFLOPS, which places it second after the US, said Jin Zhuanglong, minister of The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology(MIIT), on August 19.

The minister made the remark during the opening ceremony of the 2023 China Computational Power Conference in Yinchuan, Ningxia Hui autonomous region.

Jin said that computing power has become a key productivity tool in the digital economy era and is "the cornerstone of the digital and intelligent transformation of the whole society."

EFLOPS is a unit of the speed of computer systems. It equals one quintillion floating-point operations per second, said a China Daily report on August 21.

More efforts will be made to enhance independent innovation capabilities in areas such as computing algorithms and key chip products such as graphics processing units, Jin said.

The scale of China's core computing power industry reached RMB1.8 trillion ($247 billion) in 2022. Every RMB1 invested in computing power can drive economic growth of RMB3 to 4 in GDP, according to calculations made by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said the China Daily report.