China Mobile aims to use homegrown chips to triple AI computing power

State-owned telecom giant China Mobile announced plans to use only homegrown chips for the nation’s largest artificial intelligence computing network by 2028, accelerating China’s efforts to become a leader in AI and reduce its reliance on foreign technology, reports the South China Morning Post. China Mobile chairman Yang Jie outlined the ambitious target at the company’s Global Partners Conference in Guangzhou on Saturday.

The telco, he said, planned to double its investment in AI and explore the construction of a computing cluster with 100,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), taking its national total to 100 EFLOPS of AI computing power.

An EFLOP—a unit of computing speed equal to one quintillion floating-point operations per second—is used to rate the performance of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.