China AI industry to see scale reach over $240b

China's artificial intelligence industry will make great strides in the next 10 to 15 years, with its market scale reaching 1.73 trillion yuan ($240.4 billion) by 2035 accounting for 30.6 percent of the world's total, according to a new report released by market research firm CCID Consulting.

AI has become a major driving force for bolstering the innovative development of digital economy, and its integration with the real economy is speeding up, which will promote the digital transformation of industries and the industrialization of digital technologies, the report said.

The number of large language models with more than 1 billion parameters in China reached 234 as of December 2023, while generative AI technology is increasingly applied in wider fields, such as media, finance, retail, healthcare, and intelligent manufacturing, it added.

The consultancy said in another report that the demand for computing power will see explosive growth driven by the rapid development of AI, the internet of things and other cutting-edge technologies.

China's total computing power is expected to exceed 360 EFLOPS in 2026, with the compound annual growth rate reaching 20 percent between 2024 and 2026.

EFLOPS is a unit of the speed of computer systems, and it equals to one quintillion floating-point operations per second.

In addition, Chinese enterprises' expenditures on digital transformation of businesses stood at 2.3 trillion yuan in 2023, according to CCID Consulting.