China's 300 exaflop dream: Can they achieve it by 2025?
China has announced an ambitious plan to increase its national compute capacity by 30% this year. The current capacity, revealed at the Global Digital Economy Conference 2024, stands at over 8.1 million datacenter racks with a combined processing power of 230 exaflops. Wang Xiaoli, a representative of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, stated that the country aims to reach a processing power of 300 exaflops by 2025.
What is an exaflop?
An exaflop is a measure of performance for a supercomputer that can calculate at least one quintillion (a billion billion or 1 followed by 18 zeros) floating point operations per second. Floating point refers to calculations made where all the numbers are expressed with decimal points, allowing for more precise representation of real numbers.
Tesla's role in China's computing surge
Tesla may play a significant role in China's plan to boost its computing power. Yovole Network, a Shanghai-based cloud computing datacenter service provider, has adopted various technologies for its datacenters and has "partnered with Tesla to apply their Megapack energy storage technology at our intelligent computing center." This partnership was announced alongside news of state-owned enterprises procuring Tesla Model Y vehicles for corporate use. The specifics of how China intends to add 70 exaflops to its compute power remain undisclosed.
China's economic transformation through compute capacity boost
Beijing is promoting this ambitious plan as a means to transform its economy as increased national compute capacity will enable wider deployment of AI workloads. However, China's push to 300 exaflops by 2025 may be too ambitious. The Chinese state media has reported a jump in the nation's compute power from 180 exaflops in 2022 to 197 in August 2023. In the past 11 months, China's exaflops count has increased by 33 to 230 currently.
