China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published a 15th Five-Year Plan on September 7, 2026, targeting 9,800 exaflops of intelligent computing capacity by 2030, backed by roughly $532 billion (3.8 trillion yuan) in planned information-infrastructure investment.
Read the full story: China Bets $532B, 9,800 Exaflops on a National AI Compute Plan →
Transcript
China just published a formal five-year plan putting a number on its AI ambitions: 9,800 exaflops of computing capacity by 2030, backed by roughly $532 billion in spending. China's own numbers show it already had 2,185 exaflops by this June, so the target is still more than a fourfold climb from here. The plan calls for clusters running 10,000 to 100,000 GPU cards, the same scale as the biggest AI buildouts in the US. Here's the real story.
US export controls block Nvidia and AMD's best chips from reaching China, and this plan doesn't blink. It's a bet that domestic chipmakers, SMIC, Huawei's Ascend line, Cambricon, can fill that gap at hyperscaler scale.