May 19, 2025
The National Data Administration of China announced a 2025 action plan for building a digital China, covering eight key areas of action: institutional innovation, local brand development, enhanced artificial intelligence, infrastructure improvement, data industry development, and digital talent development.
According to the plan, the added value of the basic industries of China’s digital economy is expected to account for more than 10% of GDP by 2025.
China expects that by the end of this year, significant progress will have been made in building a digital China, with the continued expansion of new, high-quality productive forces in the digital industry, significant improvements in the quality and efficiency of digital economic development, and an increase in computing power to more than 300 computational operations.
The plan indicated that China’s total computing power will exceed 300 EFLOPS by that time. EFLOPS is a unit of measurement for computer systems, equal to a quintillion floating point calculations per second. Steady progress will also be made in building a unified data element market.
The plan calls for deepening reforms related to market-oriented data element allocation, accelerating the establishment of a unified national data market, facilitating the development of a data-driven digital economy tailored to local conditions, strengthening international cooperation in the digital field, and comprehensively raising the overall level of China’s digital development.
More efforts will be made to explore AI application scenarios, advance the construction of high-quality AI data sets, improve and upgrade the Internet of Things and the Industrial Internet, advance the “East-West Computing” big data project, and promote the development and utilization of public data resources.
China’s digital industry generated revenue of 8.5 trillion yuan (about US$1.18 trillion) in the first quarter of this year, a 9.4% year-on-year increase, according to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
This year’s government work report noted that the country will “accelerate the digitalization of manufacturing, foster a number of service providers with industrial expertise and digital knowledge, and strengthen support for the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises.”
