Internet economy on cusp of expansion

China's sprawling internet economy is entering a new stage of development, as the country takes strides toward building world-leading digital infrastructure and exploring various applications of cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, experts said.

Shang Bing, president of the Internet Society of China, said accelerating the development of the digital economy represented by the internet has become a strategic choice to grasp the new round of scientific and technological revolution and new opportunities for industrial transformation.

According to a report released by the Internet Society of China, the number of internet users in China exceeds 1 billion, and that of 5G users exceeds 650 million, both ranking first in the world.

Meanwhile, China's network architecture continues to be optimized, with network quality reaching or even surpassing the level of developed countries in Europe, the report said.

The country is also at the forefront of the world in quantum communication and AI, and filed nearly 3.2 trillion patent applications in the field of information and communication in 2022, which accounts for 37 percent of the total global applications in that sector, the report stated.

What is more, China's total computing power reached 180 EFLOPS by the end of last year, ranking second in the world after the United States.

EFLOPS is a unit of the speed of computer systems, equal to one quintillion floating-point operations a second.

Xie Cun, head of the information and communication development department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said the ministry will introduce new policies to promote the high-quality development of computing power infrastructure, further strengthen top-level design and enhance the comprehensive supply capacity of computing power.

The policy proposal follows expectations that China's computing power industry will usher in new development opportunities for major Chinese tech companies that have rolled out ChatGPT-like AI chatbots, which have higher requirements for computing power in the process of AI large language model training.

Large language models, or LLMs, are computer algorithms fed with huge amounts of textual data for use in a variety of tasks, ranging from natural language processing to machine translation. They are the key technologies behind ChatGPTlike products.

Data from the Internet Society of China showed that China has developed more than 80 LLMs, or rivals of ChatGPT, which are driving the application of AI in more sectors.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is focusing on the development needs of computing power. It said more efforts will be made in enhancing independent innovation capabilities in areas like computing architecture and computing algorithms, and in strengthening the research and development of key products like AI chips and computer servers.

Zhang Yunming, vice-minister of industry and information technology, said that in the era of digital economy, computing power has become critical in all fields of production and life, like water and electricity, and is injecting new momentum into the digital transformation of all walks of life.

According to estimates by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, sales revenue 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 3 to 4 yuan in GDP.