China Mobile, the state-owned mobile carrier, will expand its artificial intelligence (AI) data centers using only China-made chips, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on the 14th.
According to SCMP, Yang Jie, chairman of China Mobile, the country's largest telecom operator, attended a conference held in Guangzhou over the weekend and presented this goal as "meaning strengthening efforts to reduce reliance on foreign technology, as China stands at the forefront in AI."
Yang said China Mobile will double its investment in AI and build a computer cluster made up of 100,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) to secure AI computing power of 100 exaflops (EFLOPS, 100 quintillion floating-point operations per second).
SCMP interpreted the plan as expanding the capacity to about three times in three years, given that China Mobile's computing power stood at 29.2 exaflops as of the end of last year.
Chairman Yang Jie said, "As AI has become the core engine of new productivity, humanity has already entered the 'AI Plus' era," adding, "AI will not replace humans, but it will take over repetitive tasks and the like."
Accounting for 6.4% of China's total AI computing power, China Mobile plays a central role in the "Dongshu Xisuan" (East Data West Computing) project, which China launched in 2022 to expand AI infrastructure.
The project involves moving data (shu) from eastern regions of China to the west for processing (suan). As of Apr. 4, China Mobile had built more than 21 data centers in eastern cities and elsewhere.
In response to U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors, the Chinese government announced an "AI Plus (+)" roadmap at the end of Aug., and it is expected to become a key theme of the 15th five-year plan (2026–2030), which is set to be finalized this month.
"AI+" is a policy that applies AI across a range of fields, including industry, consumption, health care, and agriculture, and it was first presented at last year's Two Sessions (the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference).
At the time, Yang Jie, a Commissioner of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said, "We must shift from '+AI,' an auxiliary means that helps the development of other industries, to 'AI+,' an essential infrastructure that underpins economic upgrading."