East China's Shanghai is establishing a smart computing capabilities industry zone in its Lin-gang Special Area, with cumulative sector output of over 10 billion yuan ($1.41 billion) reached by 2025, city officials said on June 2.

Things get underway at the 2023 Lin-gang Intelligent Computing Conference, in the Lin-gang Special Area. [Photo/WeChat ID: shlgguanweihui]

During the 2023 Lin-gang Intelligent Computing Conference held in the Lin-gang Special Area on June 2, industry officials announced that developing AI computing capabilities – primarily focused on AI – would address the increasing demands driven by ChatGPT and similar generative AI technologies.

The officials also announced the establishment of open and shared AI centers and alliances, which will provide these capabilities to all organizations, including small and medium-sized enterprises, or SMEs.

By 2025, the total computing capacity of the Lin-gang area is projected to hit 5EFLOPS – floating point operations per second – with AI capabilities of 80 percent. FLOPS is the unit of measurement that calculates the performance capability of a supercomputer. Floating-point operations can only be executed on computers with integrated floating-point registers.

What's more, local computing capacity industry output is predicted to be worth over 10 billion yuan by 2025, with 100 related companies and organizations and over 5,000 personnel in the zone, officials told the conference.

Shanghai is constructing a citywide computing capacity network, with public computing network platforms and alliances, meeting the demands of researchers and SMEs.

The AI computing resources base will become "a public service like electricity and water today," said Tang Wenkan, deputy director of the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization.

The Lin-gang Special Area Intelligent Computing Alliance launches on June 2, with China Unicom as the first rotating president. [Photo/WeChat ID: shlgguanweihui]

The Lin-gang Special Area Intelligent Computing Alliance was founded during the conference, with industry giants involved like Hong Kong -listed SenseTime.

SenseTime has invested heavily to construct an Artificial Intelligence Data Center, or AIDC in Lin-gang. Opened in 2022, AIDC is expected to significantly boost the capabilities of SenseTime's AI infrastructure and capabilities and accelerate AI industrialization in different sectors, as well as create a vibrant AI ecosystem.

Lin-gang has competitive advantages in developing its AI computing network – with huge volumes of industrial data and surging demand from integrated circuits, advanced manufacturing and intelligent automobile producers based in the zone. This is expected to boost AI algorithms usage in more industries and create commercial value quickly.