China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has published a five-year plan for the information and communications sector covering 2026 through 2030. It sets a target of 9,800 EFLOPS of intelligent computing capacity by 2030 and calls for 3.8 trillion yuan (roughly 86 trillion yen) in cumulative investment in information infrastructure. Reaching that level would require more than quadrupling the most recent measured figure.

Thirteen headline indicators define the 2030 picture

The plan aims to have a new-generation communications network fully in place by 2030, and it pins that ambition to 13 headline indicators. Four of them stand out.

Information and communications industry revenue is to reach 4.1 trillion yuan (about 93 trillion yen). Cumulative investment in information infrastructure is set at 3.8 trillion yuan (about 86 trillion yen). Intelligent computing capacity is to hit 9,800 EFLOPS. And 5G user penetration is to reach 95 percent. The plan also specifies 50 base stations per 10,000 people, including 5G-A, and average annual growth of 7 percent in total telecommunications business volume.

※1 CNY = 22.8 JPY (as of September 8, 2026)

One EFLOPS represents a quintillion floating-point operations per second. The number is hard to grasp on its own, but placing it next to today's figures makes the ambition clearer.

Capacity stands at 2,185 EFLOPS after growing 2.8 times in a year

According to MIIT, China's intelligent computing capacity reached 2,185 EFLOPS at the end of June 2026, up 177 percent from a year earlier — close to a 2.8-fold increase in twelve months. The country had also built 52 intelligent computing facilities, each equipped with more than 10,000 accelerator cards.

Figures from the National Data Administration put capacity at roughly 2,450 EFLOPS by the end of July. Even so, hitting 9,800 EFLOPS means building more than four times the June level. Judged purely by the recent growth rate the target looks reachable, but growth rates normally slow as the base gets larger. The next five years will be a different kind of problem.

Two cluster sizes, 10,000 cards and 100,000 cards

The plan calls for the orderly deployment of clusters built around 10,000 accelerator cards as well as clusters using 100,000 or more. Alongside them, it calls for inference computing facilities designed for specific applications. The thinking is that training and inference demand different properties, so the facilities themselves should be built differently.

The plan also states explicitly that efforts to adapt infrastructure to home-grown computing chips will be strengthened. With export controls still in place, the direction is to optimise around the semiconductors that are actually available, right down to how the facilities are operated.

Across the document there are 26 key tasks spanning six areas, including information infrastructure construction and network and data security. Launching 6G commercial services at an appropriate time and accelerating a nationwide integrated computing power network are singled out among them. Setting up an industry anti-fraud laboratory and pushing companies to deepen the integration of AI and manufacturing are also included.

An extension of East Data, West Computing

This concentration of computing resources continues the East Data, West Computing project launched in 2022, which shifts power-hungry workloads away from the densely populated east toward western regions with cheaper land and more available electricity. China has since assembled a network built around eight national computing hubs, 10 data-centre clusters and three regions focused on coordinating computing facilities with power supply.

The underlying communications network is already substantial. Gigabit optical access is available in every county, and 5G covers every town and more than 95 percent of administrative villages. The new plan is essentially about what gets stacked on top of that. Under the Digital China framework, there is also a target to raise the value added by core digital economy industries to 12.5 percent of GDP by 2030.

Summary

MIIT's five-year plan positions AI computing capacity as a headline indicator of national information infrastructure. The 9,800 EFLOPS figure is more than four times the level measured at the end of June 2026. Separating 10,000-card and 100,000-card clusters, tuning operations around domestic chips, and choosing sites based on electricity — taken together, the items on the list show that securing computing capacity is no longer a semiconductor problem alone. How much of the 3.8 trillion yuan actually gets deployed will shape where China stands five years from now.

※ The thumbnail image is AI-generated.