The launch of a new service by China's mega computing project encourages high-tech development in the west.

A significant move at one of the eight hub nodes of the massive data infrastructure project known as "Eastern Data Western Computing" or EDWC, China unveiled its first integrated computing power service platform on Friday.

The platform, which is situated in the city of Yinchuan in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwest China, unites and manages the computing power resources of about 27 top big data businesses and organizations, including Huawei, ZTE, AliCloud, Baidu, and SenseTime.

It provides processing resources throughout China and seeks to stimulate the growth of cutting-edge technologies, particularly in the western area, including ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence (AI).

According to Cao Zhennan, vice president of Sugon, a Chinese supercomputer manufacturer supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the platform will also accelerate digital transformation in the areas of weather forecasting, industrial simulation design, agriculture, and molecular structure simulation for new materials.

A sizable data center for GPUs, which were once known as graphics processing units but are now more often utilized for executing complicated computations exponentially better than Central Processor Units, was also started in the Ningxian city of Zhongwei (CPUs).

China's "Eastern Data Western Computing" initiative, which was launched in February 2022, aims to create eight national computing hubs along the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the eastern Yangtze River Delta region, the southern Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the southwest Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the southwest China's Guizhou Province, the northwest China's Gansu

The initiative sought to solve the issue of energy- and land-intensive data centers, which are now more prevalent in the eastern areas, and move them to the west, where resources are more plentiful and access to green energy is greater. In this method, data computing requirements from eastern countries that don't need low network latency may be shifted to western regions, which might spur growth there and eliminate the disparities and deficiencies between the two.

One of the objectives specified in China's Fourteenth Five-Year Plan is being carried out through the EDWC initiative. To increase computational power planning and intelligent scheduling, a nationally integrated large data center system must be built faster.