China's Share of Global Computing Capacity Likely to Reach 30% by 2030: Academician

Phoenix News — China's share of global computing capacity is expected to reach 30 percent by 2030, Wu Hequan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said at a forum over the weekend. Currently, China accounts for 21 percent of global computing capacity, compared with 46 percent for the United States.

Wu made the remarks at the main forum of the 2026 China Computing Power Conference, held from September 11 to 13 in Langfang, Hebei Province.

China's domestic demand for computing power has experienced explosive growth amid the rapid development of AI models and innovative applications. The country has listed the construction of a computing power network as one of the "six networks" under the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030).

A report released by the China Telecom Research Institute on September 12 predicted that China's annual token consumption will reach 100 quadrillion in 2026 and exceed 35 quintillion by 2030, translating to a compound annual growth rate of nearly tenfold. The surging demand comes as the AI industry's focus shifts from "competition over large models and computing power to the massive deployment and commercialization of intelligent agents," the report noted.

Rao Shaoyang, director of the Institute of Industry and Enterprise Strategy at China Telecom Research Institute, told China Central Television that China's demand for computing power is projected to grow nearly tenfold annually on average over the next two to three years. In terms of structure, demand for inference computing will far outpace that of training, with inference expected to account for 80 percent of China's computing power market by 2029.

Wu said that as technology advances, token consumption should not be judged by volume but by efficiency, noting that falling application costs in China have inspired greater token use.

Industry insiders said that China has built a relatively solid comprehensive foundation for computing power — a critical edge in the global AI competition.

At the conference, He Baohong, chief engineer of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, cited statistics showing that China's comprehensive computing capacity growth has been accelerating. As of the end of June, the scale of intelligent computing was up 177 percent year-on-year, total storage capacity was about 11 percent higher than in 2025, and a three-tier high-speed computing network with one-, five- and 20-millisecond latency tiers is taking shape. Filings for generative AI services were 32 percent higher than at the end of 2025.

On the sidelines of the conference, some of China's leading tech companies showcased their latest innovative products in computing network development. China Mobile said it has built a full-stack computing-network foundation to forge an independently controllable computing base.

Liu Wei, director of the Human-Machine Interaction and Cognitive Engineering Laboratory at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, said that in the future, users will be able to draw on computing power as readily as they turn on tap water, whether for training large models or handling complex calculations.