As China embraces the coming AI era, a programme to set up a computing power corridor across the country will cover 99 per cent of the nation’s population, according to a key architect of the project.
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It is the complete opposite of the United States’ approach.
In the US, most AI computing facilities are being built in northern Virginia, an area which already boasts 70 per cent of the world’s data centres.
Meanwhile China’s corridor, launched earlier this month, has facilities distributed across a wide region, from economically developed coastal areas to the western Gobi Desert, the northern borders to Siberia, and even taking in Tibet.
By 2030, these centres will be linked by high-speed optical fibres, forming a unified network. Even in a smaller city of around 500,000 people, a start-up will be able to leverage a nearby massive computing cluster to process AI tasks with a latency of under three milliseconds – faster than the refresh rate of a smartphone screen.
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This approach is obviously more expensive and less convenient than building a centralised hub.