China launched its first integrated computing power service platform on Friday, a key initiative at one of the eight hub nodes of the mega data infrastructure project "Eastern Data Western Computing" or EDWC for short.

The platform, based in Yinchuan city of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, brings together and coordinates computing power resources from some 27 leading enterprises and organizations in the big data sector such as Huawei, ZTE, AliCloud, Baidu and SenseTime.

It offers processing resources across China and aims to fuel the development of cutting-edge technologies such as ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the western region. 

With its advanced arithmetic power, the platform will also boost digital transformation in the fields of molecular structure simulation for new materials, weather forecasting, industrial simulation design, and agriculture, according to Cao Zhennan, the vice president of Sugon, China's supercomputer manufacturer backed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The city of Zhongwei in Ningxia also kicked off the construction of a large data center for GPUs, a term that used to refer to graphics processing units but is now more widely used for performing complex computations exponentially better than Central Processing Units (CPUs). 

Initiated in February 2022, China's "Eastern Data Western Computing" project will build eight national computing hubs along the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the eastern Yangtze River Delta region, the southern Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the southwestern Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, southwest China's Guizhou Province, northwest China's Gansu Province and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region,

The project addressed the problem of energy-and-land-consuming data centers that are currently more concentrated in the eastern regions and hopes to bring them to the west which is more abundant in resources and has better access to green energy. 

In this way, eastern regions' data computing needs that do not require low network latency can be diverted to the west, and the move could drive the development in the western regions, resolving the imbalances and inadequacies between the two.

The EDWC project is an implementation of one of the stated goals outlined in China's Fourteenth Five-Year Plan. That is, to accelerate the construction of a national integrated big data center system, and strengthen computing power planning and smart scheduling.