China Mobile orders up $2.6B in intelligent data center gearChina Mobile orders up $2.6B in intelligent data center gear

Chinese server suppliers win again from giant China Mobile tender.

Robert Clark, Contributing Editor

July 3, 2024

2 Min Read
China Mobile logo on an office building.
(Source: Cynthia Lee/Alamy Stock Photo)

China Mobile continues to splash the cash on intelligent data centers, with a fresh 19.1 billion Chinese yuan (US$2.6 billion) order from local suppliers.

The biggest winners from the tender, reported Wednesday, are Kunlun IT, which supplies AI and edge servers, Huakun Zhenyu, which builds hardware based on Huawei's Kunpeng and Ascend high-performance processors, and Powerleader, a server firm that won notoriety last year with the revelation that its new CPU was a rebadged Intel chip.

A separate tender for Ethernet switching, worth 4 billion yuan, was won by optical firm Accelink Technologies.

The latest China Mobile tender follows the announcement of $4.3 billion in data center equipment contracts in mid-May.

The giant telco and rivals China Telecom and China Unicom have pivoted away from 5G in the last two years to building data centers and long haul fiber in remote regions in support of the national 'east-west' compute infrastructure scheme.

The company has constructed what it says is the world's largest telco-built intelligent data center in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, with 20,000 AI accelerator cards and capacity of 670 TFLOPS.

The whole AI process

It is planning to open two other intelligent computing centers this year, also in relative backwaters of Harbin in the northeast and Guiyang in the south.

Zhang Pengfei, an executive from China Mobile's Planning and Construction Department, said the telco currently operates 12 intelligent computing centers, covering data processing, model development and model training in key verticals, the financial news site Eastmoney reported in April.

China Mobile chairman Yang Jie told a computing network conference in April that the company's ambition was to support the entire process of AI LLM development, deployment and applications, and to encourage collaborative training across multiple computing centers.

China Telecom chairman Ke Ruiwen has said it aims to build "super-large intelligent computing clusters," with large green intelligent computing pools in western China, reaching 21 EFLOPS in scale this year.

China Unicom hasn't detailed any plans but says it will build compute infrastructure with a cloud pool that covers more than 230 cities.

These investments might be the result of state directives, but they seem to offer a return. Think tank CAICT estimates data center revenue in China totalled 190 billion yuan in 2022, with a CAGR of 27.2% over the previous three years.

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About the Author

Robert Clark

Contributing Editor, Light Reading

Robert Clark is an independent technology editor and researcher based in Hong Kong. 

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