HONG KONG, Oct 9 Reuters China aims to boost the countrys aggregate computing power by more than 50 by 2025, according to a plan released by authorities on Monday, as Beijing tightens its focus on supercomputing and artificial intelligence innovations.

The plan comes amid rising competition between China and the U.S. in many hightech areas ranging from semiconductors and supercomputers to AI, including U.S. export controls on chipmaking equipment.

The plan, released by six departments in Beijing including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology MIIT, has set a target for Chinas total computing power to reach 300 EFLOPS by 2025. EFLOPS, equal to one quintillion floatingpoint operations per second, measures a computer39;s speed.

The MIIT revealed in August that Chinas computing power has reached 197 EFLOPS this year, up from 180 EFLOPS in 2022. The ministry said it ranks China as second behind the United States, but did not elaborate on the scale of the U.S. computing power it referenced.

As AI training requires a large amount of computation, the effort to expand the supply of computing power is increasingly becoming a focus for Beijing.

According to a blog post by Google last month, the worlds toptier generative AI models will require tens of EFLOPs of AI supercomputing to maintain training times of several weeks or less.

According to the plan, China aims to build out more data centres across the country to facilitate businesses39; access to computing…