File Photo:Xinhua

 
The scale of China's core artificial intelligence (AI) industry has exceeded 400 billion yuan ($59.74 billion) and the number of related enterprises has exceeded 3,000, with major breakthroughs being made in key core technologies such as smart chips and open-source frameworks, Xiao Yaqing, minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), said at a major industry conference held in North China's Tianjin Municipality on Friday.

The innovation capabilities of iconic products such as intelligent sensors and intelligent connected vehicles saw continuous improvement, and the whole industrial system also further improved, Xiao said during the opening ceremony of the sixth World Intelligence Congress (WIC) held in Tianjin. The conference will run from Friday to Saturday.

As one of the leading events in the field of smart technology globally, WIC has made many substantial achievements in the past five years, and also attracted representatives from global industry giants to talk about the latest progress in the intelligent transformation.

AI is also widely regarded as the "next battlefield" for the tech competition between China and the US, with the latter intensifying its crackdown on China over the past years due to the fear of loss of dominancy.  

Xiao noted the deployment of intelligent information infrastructure in China has greatly accelerated - about 1.7 million 5G base stations have been built across the country, 150 large-scale industrial internet platforms have been cultivated, and more than 78 million sets of connected industrial equipment have been established.

China has now become the first country to build a 5G network based on the scale of its independent networking mode. Many players in the sector have made outstanding achievements. For instance, leading telecom carrier China Mobile has opened over 850,000 base stations, accounting for one-third of the total in the world, according to a statement sent to the Global Times by the company previously.

Xiao emphasized that it is necessary to accelerate the construction of intelligent information infrastructure, orderly promote the construction of 5G networks and gigabit optical networks, improve the layout of new infrastructure such as industrial internet, data centers, and the Internet of Things, and reasonably deploy supercomputing centers.

Meanwhile, China continued to be the leading growth market for cloud infrastructure services expenditure in the first quarter of 2022, according to a report by the technology market research firm Canalys.

Such expenditure on the Chinese mainland hit $7.3 billion in the first three months, up 21 percent from a year ago, accounting for 13 percent of the global total, said Canalys.

Global Times