All parties are actively laying out large computing power clusters. It can be said that whoever has mastered the Wanka cluster and can afford to use it determines the life and death of an enterprise in the AI era.
On April 29th, the three-day 2024 China Mobile Computing Network Conference officially came to an end. During the conference, China Mobile officially released the world’s largest single intelligent computing center – China Mobile Intelligent Computing Center (Hohhot), which is currently in use.
In addition, according to information obtained by the First Financial News reporter, China Telecom Tianyi Cloud will also make new moves in AI intelligent computing at the upcoming China Telecom Cloud Ecology Conference.
At present, the application of artificial intelligence has created a huge demand market for intelligent computing. In the context of Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and other Internet and technology enterprises attacking the city, operators have also begun to seize the layout. An inevitable computing power race has begun.
What is the strength of the operator?
According to Zhang Pengfei, Manager of the Business Support Department of China Mobile’s Planning and Construction Department, China Mobile has officially launched 12 intelligent computing centers nationwide, covering tasks such as data processing, model development, model training, and model inference. As the largest intelligent computing center in Hohhot, it deploys approximately 20000 AI acceleration cards and has an intelligent computing power of 6.7EFLOPS (67 billion floating-point operations per second).
From a numerical perspective, the computing power scale that Hohhot Intelligent Computing Center can provide can be considered among the top in China.
According to reporters, among the intelligent computing centers that have been put into use in China, only Alibaba Cloud Zhangbei Super Intelligent Computing Center ranks ahead of China Mobile. The center was officially launched on August 30, 2022, providing a total intelligent computing power construction scale of 12EFLOPS (120 billion floating-point operations per second). Ranked third is the Shangtang Technology Intelligent Computing Center, with a construction scale of 3740PFLOPS (37.4 billion floating-point operations per second), and fourth is the Alibaba Cloud Ulanqab Intelligent Computing Center, with a construction scale of approximately 3000PFLOPS (30 billion floating-point operations per second).
Starting from 2023, the procurement demand for cloud computing power by operators has stabilized. Industry insiders believe that telecom cloud services have entered a period of investment return and are now focusing on intelligent computing power. According to Gao Tongqing, Deputy General Manager of China Mobile Communications Group Co., Ltd., China Mobile will open its intelligent computing centers located in Harbin, Hohhot, and Guiyang in 2024, providing core computing resources for nearly 60000 AI acceleration cards.
Despite the current large scale of general computing power in China, intelligent computing power is relatively insufficient. Against this background, the three major operators have recently made statements in public cooperation to layout AI computing power. Yang Jie, Chairman of China Mobile, once again elaborated on China Mobile’s layout ideas in the field of computing power networks at the computing power network conference. “China Mobile has completed a leapfrog development from cloud to computing, and computing power networks have become the core driving force for the company’s transformation and upgrading,” he said.
The bidding data can also reflect the progress of telecom operators in the field of intelligent computing. China Telecom’s AI server procurement bidding in 2024 was the first to land, and the bidding data shows that China Telecom has purchased a total of 4175 training servers in this round of bidding, with an estimated procurement amount of about 8.4 billion yuan. On March 23, 2024, China Unicom issued a pre qualification announcement for the 2024 China Unicom Artificial Intelligence Server Centralized Procurement Project, which will purchase a total of 2503 artificial intelligence servers and 688 key networking equipment ROCE switches. The estimated procurement amount is 4 billion yuan.
China Mobile has recently launched the centralized procurement of new intelligent computing centers from 2024 to 2025. According to bidding data, the hardware scale collected in this round has reached 8054 units, including 7994 artificial intelligence servers and supporting products, and 60 white box switches. Previously, China Mobile also released the 2023-2024 new intelligent computing center (experimental network) centralized procurement project, with a total of 2454 AI training servers purchased for 12 packages. The total scale of two centralized purchases of artificial intelligence servers exceeded 10000 units.
“Currently, all parties are actively laying out large computing power clusters. It can be said that whoever masters the Wanka cluster can afford to use it, which determines the life and death of an enterprise in the AI era.” A computing power industry expert told reporters at the conference.
Internet cloud business is under pressure?
While the operators “race horse enclosure” layout the intelligent computing center, the technology enterprises led by Internet enterprises are also accelerating the pace of deployment.
On April 28, 2024, during the Zhongguancun Forum Annual Meeting, Alibaba Cloud and Mentougou District of Beijing signed a cooperation agreement on artificial intelligence computing centers. Alibaba Cloud will participate in the construction of the latter’s artificial intelligence computing center and conduct research and cooperation with Mentougou District in policy guidance, top-level design, technical architecture, and application scenarios. At the end of last month, Huawei Cloud also signed a cooperation agreement with Guizhou Gui’an New Area. According to the agreement, Huawei Cloud will make every effort to build the “world’s largest and leading intelligent computing center” in Guizhou.
“All parties are competing to seize the market trend of 2024.” An anonymous Huawei Cloud related person told reporters that in the field of intelligent computing, the current focus is on capital and resources. The threshold for capital is eliminating a group of waist enterprises that cannot invest huge amounts of funds, and resources refer to the ability to acquire core hardware such as chips.
“In this regard, operators, as central enterprises and industry chain owners, have demonstrated strong bargaining power,” said the aforementioned person.
Since the beginning of this year, the cloud computing price cut tide initiated by Internet manufacturers has shown that the market competition has entered a white hot trend. For example, Alibaba Cloud has repeatedly lowered prices for sales and directly sold cloud services through live streaming rooms on online platforms.
“This shows the crisis awareness of Internet enterprises in cloud business from the side, and this crisis awareness is likely to continue to operate in the field of artificial intelligence computing.” The above person commented.
According to the “China Public Cloud Service Market (Q3 2023) Tracking” report released by IDC, the market share of mobile cloud public cloud (laaS+PaaS) services ranked from six to five, with a year-on-year increase of 74.6%. Among them, Alibaba Cloud’s market share decreased by 5.8%, and its share was divided among Huawei Cloud, Tianyi Cloud, and Mobile Cloud.
From the financial report data, cloud business has become one of the key businesses driving the growth of operators. According to annual report data, China Mobile’s cloud business revenue in 2023 was 83.349 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth rate of 65.5%. China Unicom’s cloud business achieved a revenue of RMB 51 billion in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 41.6%. China Telecom Tianyi Cloud’s revenue reached RMB 97.2 billion, a year-on-year increase of 67.9%, and its international business revenue exceeded RMB 13.7 billion.
However, there are also views that in the AI era, Internet enterprises have advantages in cloud computing that operators do not have. In the opinion of Huo Jinjie, president of IDC China, for 41% of companies in the world, cloud enterprises are their main partners in AI business. To do AI well, the first thing is to find the right cloud. SaaS is an important delivery mode in the future. In this field, Internet cloud business has comparative advantages in both technology and talent.