Shenzhen released Dec. 5 an action plan for high-quality development of its computing power infrastructure for 2024-2025 amid its push to foster the new industrialization and digital economy.

The plan aims to construct a high-quality development pattern for computing power infrastructure, which will be technologically advanced, logically laid out, demand-matched, secure, reliable, and environmentally friendly, and to build Shenzhen into a benchmark for computing network development, according to the city’s industry and information technology bureau.

As per the plan, which proposes 20 specific measures in seven aspects, the city’s data center rack size will reach 500,000 standard racks by 2025. The city also aims to achieve a general computing power of 14 EFLOPS (FP32), intelligent computing power of 25 EFLOPS (FP16), and supercomputing power of 2 EFLOPS (FP64).

EFLOPS is a unit of measure for computer speed, with one EFLOPS system completing 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second.

The plan also proposes to promote the planning and construction of new data centers and achieve low-carbon development by adopting various green energy-saving technologies to upgrade existing data centers.

What is computing power?

In the 1940s, electronic computers were born, marking the beginning of the information technology revolution. Early computers were essentially large calculators, primarily used for complex military calculations.

In 1958, the integrated circuit emerged, formally ushering in the era of microchips. Empowered by the capabilities of microchips, computers have become increasingly powerful and smaller in size. Today, microchips have become synonymous with computing power.

On a more specific note, the technical capacities of microchips, such as CPUs and GPUs, are referred to as computing power. Storage technologies related to memory and hard drives are referred to as “storage power.” Software technologies such as operating systems, databases and applications are referred to as “algorithms.” Broadly speaking, computing power encompasses narrow computing power, storage power and algorithms.

Cutting-edge concepts such as cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain all fall under the applications of computing power. In other words, anything related to IT can be broadly referred to as the field of computing power.