China targets 50% growth in computing power in race against the US

China aims to boost the country’s overall computing power by more than 50 percent by 2025, according to a plan released by authorities on Monday, as Beijing steps up its focus on innovation in supercomputers and artificial intelligence. The plan comes amid growing competition between China and the US in many high-tech areas ranging from semiconductors and supercomputers to AI, including US controls on exports of chip-making equipment.

The plan, released by six departments in Beijing, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), aims for China’s total computing power to reach 300 EFLOPS by 2025. EFLOPS, equal to one quintillion floating-point operations per second, measures speed on the computer. MIIT revealed in August that China’s computing power reached 197 EFLOPS this year, up from 180 EFLOPS in 2022. The ministry said it ranked China second only to the United States, but did not detail the scale of U.S. computing power, which refers to .