Computing power becomes new engine driving economic growth in China: MIIT

(ECNS) -- Computing power has injected energy into the digital transformation of all walks of life and is becoming an important driving force for high-quality economic and social development, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said Monday.

Official data shows that by the end of 2022, over 6.5 million standard rack units have been in service at the country's data centers and the total computing capacity has reached 180Elops, ranking the second in the world. Meanwhile, the computing power storage has exceeded 1,000 EB (1 trillion GB) by the end of 2022.

Several authoritative reports released lately believe that in the digital economy era, computing power has become a new engine driving economic growth after heating power and electric power.

According to calculations by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), the scale of China's core computing power industry reached 1.8 trillion yuan ($251 billion) in 2022. Every 1 yuan invested in computing power will drive economic growth of three to four yuan in GDP.

The Global Computing Power Index Evaluation Report (2022-203) jointly compiled by Tsinghua University and the International Data Corporation (IDC) and other institutions pointed out that the global GDP growth has generally slowed down, but the digital economy has maintained strong growth, with computing power becoming the main driving force for economic growth.

With an average increase of one point of the computing power index of 15 key countries, their national digital economy and GDP will increase by 3.6‰ and 1.7‰ respectively, and this trend is expected to continue until 2026, said the report.

Li Donghong, an expert from Tsinghua University said that the driving effect of improving computing power on a country's economic growth is significant, and with the increase of computing power index, such an effect will become more and more obvious.

Countries that lead the computing power development will see more advantages as their investment into computing power increases, and expanding computing power investment has become a new engine to drive national economic growth, Li said.

According to Zhou Zhengang, vice president of IDC China, the U.S. and China are the top two countries on the list of computing power index. In 2022, the overall server market still maintained a positive growth of 6.9 percent, reaching $27 billion, accounting for 25 percent of the global market, ranking after the U.S.

IDC statistics show in 2022, China's accelerated server market reached $7.07 billion, accounting for more than 20 percent of the total server market. It is estimated that in 2027, the scale of China's accelerated server market will at least double that of 2022.