China's Inner Mongolia is bolstering its infrastructure network to drive growth in the green computing sector, seeking to capitalize on its energy resources and geographical advantages.
In the autonomous region's Ulanqab City, great efforts have been made to attract companies from various sectors such as big data and new energy with the scale of local computing power achieving an average annual growth rate of 195 percent over the past two years.
The city has signed contracts with eight companies and is set to launch a batch of intelligent computing center projects.
"By introducing leading enterprises in computing power and artificial intelligence applications, and gathering both upstream and downstream enterprises, we will build an AI industrial ecosystem that integrates computing power services, trading, and intelligent applications," said Liu Huansuo, deputy head at the Ulanqab Big Data Administration.
In Hohhot, another major city in the region, the proportion of green electricity used in the local computing power industry stands at 86 percent. The core zone of the city's computing power industry has gathered 50 large data centers, including operators, financial institutions and some leading enterprises.
"We will continue to improve green computing power infrastructure, make forward-looking arrangements for future industries such as quantum computing, constantly optimize the functions of the computing power deployment platform, and strive to build a national base for supporting green computing power," said Zhang Lei, director at the digital economy development division under the Government Service and Data Management Bureau of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
Inner Mongolia boosts green computing power, hoping to foster AI industrial ecosystem
Tokyo stocks ended lower Monday, with the benchmark 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average falling around 1 percent, amid concern that the surging yen could disrupt companies' business outlooks, said an analyst.
The benchmark Nikkei stock index, the 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average, ended down 607.12 points, or 0.94 percent, from Friday at 63,754.90.
The broader Topix index, meanwhile, finished 43.27 points, or 1.08 percent, lower at 3,960.03.
The Japanese yen rose sharply on Monday, briefly surging to the lower 155 yen range against the U.S. dollar, after Japan confirmed joint currency market intervention with the United States and possible further intervention.
The U.S. dollar fetched 156.76-78 yen after briefly hitting 155.20 yen, compared with 157.33-43 yen in New York and 160.20-22 yen in Tokyo at 17:00 local time Friday.
"Over in Tokyo, the big story was of course the rare joint action by Japan and the U.S. to support the yen, which had been trading near 40-year lows in recent weeks. Japan's finance ministry confirmed that coordinated intervention today and said the two countries are prepared to act on that again. The yen rose as much as 1.4 percent at one stage and the Nikkei 225 fell around 1 percent. The stronger currency was weighing on exporters. There we had Suzuki Motor down 6.7 percent. Many Japanese-listed companies earn a substantial share of their revenues overseas, and a stronger yen reduces the value of those earnings when they are translated back into the Japanese currency. AI-linked stocks also weighed on the market, with the chip-testing-equipment maker Advantest down 3.3 percent," said Timothy Pope, a Shanghai-based market analyst for China Global Television Network (CGTN).
Pope said that in the rest of the week, investors are going to watch closely the earning reports to be released by the major companies.
"Tokyo has some major earnings to watch this week as well. So, we will be following Toyota, Nintendo and SoftBank -- all of them are due to report. SoftBank's results will be watched particularly closely for further clues about the returns, the risks as well as all of those associated with the enormous sums being invested in AI at the moment," said Pope.
Tokyo stocks end lower Monday on stronger yen: analyst
