China’s dark compute power could be 6,000 times higher than current estimates
Domestic AI amounts to 1,882,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second, vastly more than Western rankings suggest
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According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), China has achieved 1,882 exaflops – short for exa floating-point operations per second – which translates to 1,882 quintillion, or billion billion, calculations per second.
The figure is more than 6,000 times higher than the country’s computing power as reflected in the Top500 list, one of the few available benchmarks for comparing China’s supercomputing progress with other countries, especially the United States.AdvertisementWhile the two are not directly comparable, and the Germany-based ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers is often seen as an underestimate, the latest data released by the MIIT on Tuesday suggests China’s computing power is rising fast.
Unlike China, the US – which dominates the Top500 – does not publish a single national figure for AI computing power as most of the infrastructure is owned by private companies and measured using different standards.
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