China's Ascent to Global Computing Power

China's digital infrastructure now ranks among the world's most advanced in both scale and technology, with its total computing power second only to the United States'.

The head of China's National Data Administration said this at a recent press conference in Beijing.

Over the past decade, China has pushed companies to develop domestic manufacturing capabilities in high-tech industries. That strategy has made it a leading producer of electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels, and it is now being applied to the foundations of advanced AI: computing power, skilled talent and vast data resources, according to The New York Times (NYT).

Talent is proving to be one of China's greatest strengths. According to the proprietary Dimensions database released in July, in 2024 China-based scholars produced 23,695 AI-related publications — more than the combined output of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union.

"Given a young, vibrant and highly educated, AI-literate workforce, we should anticipate a wave of innovation from China along the same lines as DeepSeek," said Daniel Hook, CEO of Digital Science, in the report DeepSeek and the New Geopolitics of AI: China's Ascent to Research Pre-eminence in AI.

Open-source development is another area where China is advancing quickly. "Open-source is a source of technological soft power," Kevin Xu, founder of Interconnected Capital, a U.S.-based hedge fund that invests in AI, technologies, told The NYT. "It is effectively the Hollywood movie or the Big Mac of technology."

Market analysts say China's embrace of open-source AI models is accelerating both AI adoption and innovation, according to CNBC. China now hosts the world's third-largest community of developers on GitHub, the largest repository of open-source software. Tech giants such as Alibaba, Baidu and Huawei have emerged as major contributors and funders of open-source projects, The Economist reported.

The impact is already visible. According to the website Artificial Analysis, 12 of the world's top 15 open-source AI models are from China. Companies like Tencent and Baidu gain further momentum by releasing AI models under open-source licenses, enabling developers worldwide to adapt and deploy them, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Alibaba's flagship open-source AI model, Qwen, alone has inspired developers to create more than 100,000 derivative models, the company said.

Source: Science and Technology Daily