China's Computing Power Network Market 2024: Trends, Scale, and Future Outlook

Data centers (DC) are facilities that house computers, networking, and storage equipment; when they also provide bandwidth services they are called Internet Data Centers (IDC). The paper distinguishes between pure space‑and‑rack DCs and IDC‑type facilities.

Computing power (算力) encompasses compute, memory, and storage capabilities and can be distributed across edge devices, cloud data centers, terminals, and forwarding nodes. The integration of computing and networking forms a new architecture called the computing‑power network, which is becoming a core digital infrastructure for the digital economy.

The digital economy in China reached 50.2 trillion RMB in 2022, accounting for 41.5% of GDP and ranking second worldwide.

AI training compute has progressed through three stages: low‑demand machine learning before deep learning, a surge after AlexNet (2012), and a further boost with large‑model algorithms such as GPT‑3.5 (2022).

According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, by June 2023 China’s total computing power reached 180 EFLOPS, the second‑largest globally. Data‑center rack capacity exceeded 650 k standard racks, with an annual growth rate over 30% and a utilization rate of 58%. The number of active servers surpassed 20 million and storage capacity exceeded 1 000 EB (1 EB‑1024 PB).

Over the past 20 years, China’s data‑center industry has evolved through four phases: physical data centers, internet data centers, cloud data centers, and intelligent (智算) data centers.

Computing power is classified into basic, intelligent, and super‑computing tiers. Basic compute accounts for 47% of total power, intelligent compute over 50%, and super‑computing less than 3%.

The Chinese computing‑power network market was valued at 624.75 billion RMB in 2022, a year‑on‑year increase of 18.26% and representing 33.98% of the global market. Forecasts project the market to exceed 1.06 trillion RMB by 2025.

The "compute + perception + connection" model delivers high‑quality, low‑cost, low‑latency compute that can generate 3–4 RMB of GDP for every 1 RMB of compute investment, significantly boosting economic output.

Industry application breakdown: Internet 53.2%, government 11.1%, telecom 6.8%, finance 6.7%, manufacturing 4.3%, education 2.7%, other sectors 15.2%.

The "East‑Data‑West‑Compute" initiative creates massive data‑transfer demands, driving the adoption of new optical technologies such as OXC, 400G/800G, OSU, SPN, 50G PON, FTTR, silicon photonics, and others. China is actively contributing to international standards like IMT‑2030 (6G), NGN, and new‑computing frameworks, while domestic alliances are drafting related standards for the computing‑power network.