A 5G intelligent robot helps maintenance personnel inspect the power supply equipment for the high-speed railway in Chuzhou City, East China's Anhui Province on January 17, 2022. Smart technology has played an important role in China's high-speed railway. Photo: cnsphoto

The 2022 China Computational Power Conference was held in Jinan, East China's Shandong Province on Saturday. China's core computational industry scale has surpassed 1.5 trillion yuan ($222.31 billion), providing further assistance to the development of the manufacturing sector, Zhang Yunming, vice minister of industry and information technology (MIIT) said. 

"China's computational industry scale has grown for five consecutive years with an increase of more than 30 percent year-on-year, ranking second in the global computational power list," said Zhang, noting that computational power is the foundation of the digital economy, and all industry participants would follow the development trend. 

During the opening ceremony, eight telecom companies, including the four communication carriers China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom and China Broadnet, and China Tower, cloud computing Inspur Group, Huawei and Alibaba Cloud, signed construction agreements, initiating dozens of database building projects worth nearly 50 billion yuan.

By the end of June, the number of 5G base stations in China reached 1.854 million, and there are more than 450 million 5G mobile phone users in the country. 

All prefecture-level cities have implemented optical network broadband, and have more than 61 million household or company users, according to data released at the conference. 

MIIT said at a press conference on July 19 that revenues of China's telecommunication sector in the first half of 2022 grew by 8.3 percent year-on-year. Revenues of multiple emerging industries including the internet data center (IDC), big data, cloud computing and internet of things reached 164.2 billion yuan in the first half of 2022. 

According to data released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the market scale of China's computational industry surpassed 1.5 trillion yuan in 2021, while the cloud computing scale surpassed 300 billion yuan, the IDC services scale was over 150 billion and the artificial intelligence scale exceeded 400 billion yuan.

Global Times