(JW Insights) Aug 24 -- China says it will prioritize the advancement of computing power as the nation turns its attention toward creating a strong foundation for its rapidly expanding digital economy, which has become an increasingly vital battleground in its tech war with the US, reported South China Morning Post on August 21.

Urgent calls to action by high-ranking Chinese officials reflect how Beijing is scrambling to bolster the nation's technological self-sufficiency as the administration of US President Joe Biden has stepped up tech curbs to contain China's technological progress and economic development.

"Computing power is now the cornerstone of digitization," said Jin Zhuanglong, the minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), at a forum on August 19 in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region.

With more than 41 percent of its economic output generated from the digital economy, China has the world's second-largest computing capacity after the United States, said the SCMP report.

To catch up, the world's second-largest economy must accelerate the construction of national computing hubs and data centers while quickening the pace of technological breakthroughs, Jin added.

Computing power is vital in supporting the operations of artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and cloud computing – underpinning everything from ride-hailing services to daily business operations and chatbots such as ChatGPT.

But Beijing's AI ambitions are facing headwinds as the US government looks to curb Chinese companies' access to American cloud computing services.

As of the end of June, China boasted a nationwide data center infrastructure with more than 7.6 million standard server racks in operation, and these have helped China achieve an average annual growth rate in computing power of nearly 30 percent over the past five years, according to Zhang, said the SCMP report.

(Li PP)