China headhunter SunTzu Recruit has learned that China Mobile recently announced the bid-winning results of the procurement package 1 of the 2024-2025 New Type Intelligent Computing Center group procurement project. Seven companies including Kunlun Technology, Huakun Zhenyu, Bode Computer, and Changjiang Computing successfully won the bid.
This large-scale procurement highlights the importance the telecommunications industry places on AI technology and is expected to have a positive impact on the entire industry chain. From server manufacturers to supporting product suppliers and service providers, all are expected to gain development opportunities. The seven winning companies may gain stronger positions in the industry, while presenting challenges to competitors who did not win the bid.
The tender announcement stated that the total procurement volume of the project is 8054 units, divided into two packages. Package 1 includes 7994 AI servers and supporting products, with an expected winning bidder of 5 to 7 companies; Package 2 involves 60 white-box switches, with an expected winning bidder of 1 company. In addition, China Mobile previously announced the procurement project for the 2023-2024 New Type Intelligent Computing Center (Trial Network), with a total procurement volume of 2454 AI training servers across 12 packages. The total scale of the two group procurements exceeds tens of thousands of units.
The development of AI technology will accelerate the iteration of infrastructure and the growth of performance requirements. More powerful AI models require stronger computing power and interconnection capabilities, leading to continuous growth in computing power demand. China Telecom and China Unicom have also initiated AI server procurement, with quantities of 4175 units and 2503 units, respectively.
Although the total capital expenditure of operators has decreased, there has been an increase in capital expenditure related to computing power. China Mobile plans to invest 47.5 billion yuan in computing power, a year-on-year increase of 21.5%; China Telecom’s capital expenditure on industrial digitalization plans is 37 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.1%. CITIC Securities’ research report pointed out that the investment in operator intelligent computing centers this year is intensive, and the construction of intelligent computing centers has become a key development direction for telecom operators.
The rapid development of AI large models and the rapid growth in demand for intelligent computing have led market consultancy firm IDC to predict that by 2026, China’s intelligent computing power scale will reach the level of 100 trillion trillion floating-point operations per second (ZFLOPS), estimated at 1271.4EFLOPS. Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Shan Zhongde, stated at a press conference that in the future, a national integrated computing power system will be continuously built from three aspects: coordinating computing power resources to improve utilization efficiency, strengthening intelligent computing leadership to optimize computing power structure, and stimulating computing power demand to improve computing power services.
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