China has switched on its first AI super cluster built from 100,000 domestically produced chips, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said Sunday, marking a new phase in the country’s effort to scale AI computing capacity.
The cluster went live at the Zhengzhou node of China’s national supercomputing network in Henan, where engineers combined traditional scientific computing infrastructure with AI‑focused hardware. Bu Jingde, chief engineer at the National High‑Performance Computer Engineering Technology Research Center, said the system can hit peak speeds equivalent to “all of humanity calculating continuously for 200 years.” The cluster is already running more than 300 computing tasks across 26 fields, including new materials, drug discovery and AI research.
AI computing clusters and capacity
A second major build‑out is under way in the Greater Bay Area. China Telecom has brought a new 10,000‑card cluster online aimed at training the next generation of large AI models. Liu Zhijun, who leads planning for the carrier’s Greater Bay Area data center, said Chinese models are moving from hundreds of billions to trillions of parameters and that the new system can cut training time for a trillion‑parameter model from roughly a year to about six months.
China’s overall AI computing capacity grew 177% year on year by the end of June, reaching 2,185 exaflops, NDRC figures show. More than 60% of the country’s computing power is now visible to a new national monitoring and scheduling platform in trial operation, which routes jobs to the most suitable hardware across regions.
Network upgrades and nationwide coordination
To better link capacity across regions, researchers at Pengcheng Laboratory in Shenzhen are developing an optical fiber that packs four separate channels into a single hair‑thin strand. Li Chao, an associate researcher at the lab, said: “It is designed to break through the capacity ceiling of regular fiber.” The team plans to deploy the cable along a roughly 1,000‑kilometre route linking Shenzhen to Guizhou, creating a national corridor for moving large amounts of data with minimal delay.
Officials expect substantial investment to support the build‑out. China expects the programme to draw roughly 4 trillion yuan (about $560 billion) in new direct investment during the 15th Five‑Year Plan period (2026–2030), mostly from private capital, according to Guo Mingjun, who heads the computing economy division at the NDRC’s State Information Center. He said funding will flow toward areas such as coordinating data centers with the power grid and the next generation of large‑scale AI clusters.
