Chinese scientists vow to create independent industrial ecosystem in chipmaking, supercomputing

As China has made remarkable achievements in technological autonomy of chipmaking and supercomputing, the country is determined to venture into an independent industrial ecosystem.

A piece of special report by China Global Television Network (CGTN) outlined the growth of China's computer and semiconductor industries over the past 75 years.

The third part of the report encapsulates China's monumental strides in realizing green transformation.

As the country's self-developed Sunway Taihulight has become one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, one drawback is the high energy demand of superpower computing.

"When thousands of servers, tens of thousands of servers work together, electricity costs can be a very astronomical figure," said Sun Guoliang, chief product officer of China's GPU maker MetaX.

The designers made Sunway Taihulight as green as possible to run.

"Sunway Taihulight has a big advantage. Its energy efficiency ratio is very high. For all its powerful computing performance, the supercomputer has a relatively small power consumption, mainly because of its full use of water-cooling technology," said Gan Lin, associate professor from the Dept. of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University.

One of China's key strategies is to channel computing resources from the East to the West, with its greater energy resources and lower population density. The digitalization process becomes both economical and eco-friendly.

Last year, China set up its first national supercomputing internet platform, creating an efficient data transmission network among various computing centers, and connecting powerful computers across the country.

Gan pointed it out that as digital infrastructure, supercomputers serve research and development across various disciplines

"It is a sci-tech infrastructure that provides a computational support for other important research, so that experts in various fields can get faster and more accurate results," he said.

"Supercomputing is an important means to promote the transformation and upgrading of our country's traditional industries, but also to promote the development of new sectors, including AI, cloud computing. Supercomputers form a very important base, which we hope could appear on the desktops of enterprise engineers, researchers and students, or even on household desktops," said Qian Depei, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

China says the integrated operation of supercomputing will form a comprehensive technological layout by 2025.

As for chips, China is also building integrated circuit industry clusters, with Loongson, Huawei, SMIC, and others. And the achievements in the chip industry have propelled manufacturing in other sectors. The Kirin 9000s powers many of China-made smart phones, such as Huawei's Mate 60 Pro.

"You know the Kirin 9000s is a really advanced chip. It is not as advanced as the most advanced ones out there, but it's within 2–2.5 nodes of what is capable today," said Dan Hutcheson, vice-chair of tech information platform TechInsights.

The same is true of new energy vehicles.

"Our team focuses on the development of chips for purposes such as the analog control of power management. We promote the development of automotive chips in an all-round way with the model of integrated design and manufacturing. This will make China's automobiles greener and more low-carbon," said Wang Yuxin, the chief expert of China Electronic Technology Corp.

Chinese chipmakers continue to seek independent innovation against headwinds such as U.S. sanctions and alienation.

Success has raised alarms outside the country. The U.S. is creating headwinds, with an extensive campaign to block the sale of Dutch chip manufacturing technology to China.

And Washington has expanded its export controls, from traditional chips to the latest AI semiconductors. It has also blacklisted some Chinese chipmakers, such as SMIC.

This opposition only serves to drive Chinese chipmakers to work even harder.

"Firstly, we will catch up with international giants in the mature technologies. And secondly, we will race in the emerging areas of the market, strive for innovation to take the lead in new areas. On the road of independent innovation, we will make our own contributions to make China a chip power," said Deng Zhonghan, co-founder and chairman of Chinese chip maker Vimicro, who also served as the chief executive of China's "Starlight Integrated-Circuit Project",

An independent industrial ecosystem is the goal. Chinese chip designer Loongson Technology has created a CPU instruction set architecture called LoongArch.

Hu Weiwu, the father of China's first CPU and founder and president of Loongson, said the idea came after U.S. unilateral sanctions on some Chinese tech firms in 2018.

At that time, all Loongson chips were based on the U.S.-developed MIPS instruction formats.

"Whoever gives you the authorization can also limit your development. We decided to develop our own instruction system," said Hu.

Loongson said they've made sure LoongArch ISA does not infringe on existing patents, and has binary translation tools for existing instructions. The goal is to reduce reliance on foreign systems.

Independent and controllable architecture - for China's IT industry, that's the way forward in new quality productive forces.

Chinese scientists vow to create independent industrial ecosystem in chipmaking, supercomputing

China's expanding ties with the Global South have pushed trade growth far beyond the global average despite the tariff pressure from the U.S., according to experts.

"Whilst the Trump tariffs ultimately led to a significant drop-off in Chinese exports to the United States and vice versa, the trading relationships across much of the rest of the world continue to grow, and China's trading relationships across the Belt and Road Initiative countries, as well as with the Global South, more broadly speaking, has grown at rates far greater than global trade growth as a whole. And we see that evidenced by the latest data. When we break that down, we see that has been underpinned by the developments in high-technology products in particular, whether it's EVs, whether it's even in semiconductors, as well as photovoltaic panels, etc.," said Dr. Warwick Powell, an adjunct professor at the Queensland University of Technology, in a TV interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN) on Thursday.

"And you've got to look at the places where the growth is taking place. Africa, I think, is a very interesting case in point, because the kinds of things that China has been exporting and expanding in terms of its exports are all about African economic development -- its machinery, its energy systems, its technology, and this really goes to delivering on China's broader strategic ambition as an emerging great power to be an enabling great power, supporting the development of its partners around the world," he added.

Qian Jun, executive dean of International School of Finance at Fudan University, attributed the trade growth to Chinese firms' endeavor to tap into key regions like ASEAN, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

"The main increase of export comes from, as we have discussed, these new areas: The ASEAN economy -- southeast Asia remains the most important trading partner -- and also Latin America, the Middle East, and these [other such] new regions. So, the exporters of the Chinese companies are also very good at adjusting their destinies, their strategies, how to market their goods and services, so that the reliance on the U.S., for example, has gone down a lot," Qian said.

China's trade momentum increasingly powered by Global South: experts