Officials: Data push will boost digital economy

China's emphasis on building basic systems for data and bolstering the development and application of data will strongly boost the high-quality development of the country's digital economy and unleash the value of massive data resources, said officials and experts.

Shen Zhulin, deputy head of the National Data Administration, said China has made great strides in developing the digital economy and promoting the construction of digital infrastructure like computing power networks, emphasizing that the country's digital economy has become an important engine for nurturing new quality productive forces, with its scale ranking second in the world.

He said the proportion of added value of core digital economy industries in the country's GDP has been increasing, while innovative achievements in cutting-edge digital technologies like integrated circuits, artificial intelligence and quantum information are emerging at a faster pace.

Shen made the remarks at a news conference regarding the China International Big Data Industry Expo 2024, which will be held in Guiyang, Guizhou province, from Aug 28 to 30.

He said this year's expo will showcase the latest trends and achievements of big data industry both at home and abroad comprehensively. The expo focuses on six main topics covering the industrialization of digital technologies, the digital transformation of industries, the value of data, digital governance, digital infrastructure and data security.

During the three-day event, prominent experts and scholars will be invited to deliver keynote speeches, while the latest policies, applications and research results in the big data industry are scheduled to be released by government departments, research institutes and participating enterprises, he said.

Major tech enterprises such as Huawei Technologies Co, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Tencent Holdings Ltd and Baidu Inc as well as three telecom carriers have confirmed their attendance. The expo has been held in Guiyang since 2015 and is the first of its kind in China, forming a communication platform for pivotal achievements in the big data industry.

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.

Jing Yaping, director of the Big Data Development Administration of Guizhou, said the province will take further steps to speed up the construction of computing infrastructure and intelligent computing centers, and bolster the application of industry-specific large language models or LLMs.

Noting that data has become a new type of production factor and serves as the key element of the digital economy, Jing said 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.

To seize the opportunities from the fast-developing artificial intelligence or AI technology, Ma Ningyu, mayor of Guiyang, stressed the need to bolster industrial application of AI-powered LLMs by providing high-performance computing power and high-quality data and accelerating the construction of LLM training platforms, as well as expand the application scenarios of data elements in more fields.

Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Information Consumption Alliance, a telecom industry association, said it is important to build computing network infrastructure and data exchange centers, explore data pricing mechanisms and value assessment systems, and accelerate the establishment of a unified domestic market for data elements.