Computing power, algorithms and data are the core factors for the digital economy. According to figures from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as of the end of June, China had built 10.85 million standard racks, and its intelligent computing power had reached 788 EFLOPS, an indicator of system speed equaling 1 quintillion floating-point calculations per second. China tops the global large language model count with 1,509 models having been released.

The central authorities now aim to ensure the country's digital development continues this rapid acceleration by making the supply of these factors more efficient. In its Recommendations for Formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development, adopted at the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Communist Party of China Central Committee on October 23, the committee called for more efficient supply of computing power, algorithms and data. To act on these recommendations, China will increase its investment in these factors with the aim of making major breakthroughs over the coming five years.

Five-year plans are comprehensive blueprints for China's development, outlining goals, strategies and priorities for each five-year period. The 15th Five-Year Plan period runs from 2026 to 2030.

As humanity enters the Intelligent Age, with rapidly increasing demand for computing power, the supply of these three core factors will be essential for China to maintain its competitive advantage in the development of AI. Maximizing efficiency will therefore be crucial for achieving China's goals of restructuring its national competitiveness and high-quality economic development.

Global competition in the technology sector has extended from trade to digital infrastructure and standard setting. China faces the persistent risk of being constrained by other countries in high-end AI chips and advanced processes. Increased domestic supply efficiency in the digital sector is therefore an important part of decreasing China's reliance on external production factors, limiting its exposure to risk and contributing to long-term technological independence.

Examples such as the U.S. using export controls on chips to limit China's technological development and Chinese-language content making up only 3 percent of the training corpus for GPT-4 demonstrate that digital development is not merely about catching up or competing, but is also about ensuring China's digital sovereignty and an equal platform in the world's digital future. While the U.S. export controls on AI chips and chipmaking equipment have slowed China's digital development in some areas, they have accelerated its development of domestically produced alternatives. China's ability to adapt to external pressures such as these will only be enhanced over the coming five years. 

A deeper motivation lies in the fact that if China is unable to ensure independent supply of these three factors, it will always be trapped in the position as a rule taker, rather than having an equal seat at the table of global digital governance. Today's international AI governance rules, from model transparency to cross-border data flows, are essentially defined by the technical practices of international giants such as OpenAI and Google. Their technology paths have shaped what AI security and privacy protection are considered to be. China's efforts to ensure more efficient supply aim to use the world's largest application scenario, most complete industrial system and most complex governance challenges to formulate alternative solutions and standards for international consideration.

The efficient supply of computing power, algorithms and data is ultimately necessary to ensure China's 1.4 billion people will never be "unplugged" by external forces or strangled by ideology and power politics. It is not merely about technological independence, but also about ensuring China's digital security.

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson 

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