(Yicai) April 29 -- China Mobile’s smart computing center in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, which boasts the biggest computing capacity of any single intelligent computing hub in the world that is operated by a telecoms firm, has been put into operation.

The Hohhot Data Center boasts computing power of 6.7 EFLOPS, or 6.7 billion floating-point operations per second, the Beijing-based carrier said at the Computing Power Network Conference yesterday. It deploys around 20,000 artificial intelligence accelerator cards and 85 percent of its AI chips are made in China.

China Mobile also plans to open super computing centers in Harbin in northeastern Heilongjiang province and Guiyang in southwestern Guizhou province this year, the Beijing-based firm said. Together with the Hohhot Data Center, the trio will provide core computing power equivalent to almost 60,000 AI accelerator cards, it said.

China Mobile is linking arms with cutting-edge manufacturers such as iPhone supplier Luxshare Precision and optical fiber and cable manufacturer Hengtong Optoelectronics to develop a number of AI-powered new industrialization projects, Chairman Yang Jie said.

The firm currently has 12 smart computing hubs in operation across the country, which are engaged in data processing as well as the development, training and reasoning of large language models, Zhang Pengfei, who works in China Mobile’s planning and construction department, told Yicai.

China Mobile bought 2,454 AI servers as part of its 2023-2024 centralized procurement scheme for intelligent computing centers and next year the purchase volume is set to more than triple, the company said on April 22.

The country’s two other main carriers are also bolstering their AI computing power. China Telecom has already purchased 4,175 AI servers in its 2023-24 procurement year worth around CNY8.4 billion (USD1.1 billion). While China Unicom said last month that it will buy around CNY4 billion of AI servers for its headquarters, in its first such bulk buy.

Editor: Kim Taylor