China's digital economy to exceed 10% of GDP by year-end

The added value of core industries of China's digital economy is expected to account for more than 10 percent of GDP by the end of this year, as the country accelerates steps to advance its digital development, according to a 2025 action plan to build a Digital China.

The plan released by the National Data Administration outlines eight major areas for action, including institutional innovation, local brand development, AI Plus, infrastructure improvement, data industry cultivation and digital talent development.

By the end of 2025, China aims to make great strides in building a Digital China, with the continuous expansion of new quality productive forces in the digital industry, and significant improvements in the quality and efficiency of digital economic development, according to the plan.

The plan noted that the total scale of China's computing power will surpass 300 EFLOPS by then. EFLOPS is a unit of the speed of computer systems and is equal to 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second. Steady progress will also be made in building a unified data elements market.

The plan calls for deepening reforms related to the market-oriented allocation of data elements, speeding up steps to cultivate a unified national data market, facilitating the development of a data-driven digital economy tailored to local conditions and strengthening international cooperation in digital domain.

More efforts will also be made to explore the application scenarios of AI, push forward the construction of high-quality AI datasets, optimize and upgrade internet of things and industrial internet, press ahead with the mega data project dubbed the "east-data-west-computing", as well as bolster the development and utilization of public data resources, the plan added.