China Unicom announces big AI computing strategy

China Unicom unveiled a big plan to accelerate the company's intelligent computing infrastructure, including exploring a 100,000-GPU cluster deployment and targeting 45 EFLOPS of computing power, by the end of 2025.

EFLOPS is a unit of the speed of computer systems and is equal to 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second.

The plan, announced by Chen Zhongyue, chairman of China Unicom, at the company's partner conference in Shanghai over the weekend, is expected to position it among the world's most powerful AI computing benchmarks.

In parallel, China Unicom will advance its Computing Power Intelligence Network through substantial network upgrades. The company is accelerating its transition to ultra-high-speed 800G and 1.2T bandwidth technologies.

This evolution will enable seamless interoperability across diverse architectures, organizational boundaries, and geographical regions while enhancing network autonomy. By integrating AI into network operations, the company aims to achieve self-configuring, self-optimizing, and self-healing capabilities, fundamentally transforming network management efficiency and user experience.

Chen emphasized the strategic importance of AI agents in commercial value realization, highlighting that "AI agents are key to unlocking commercial value."

To empower this vision, China Unicom's proprietary Yuanjing Wanwu AI Agent Development Platform will provide comprehensive tools for model management, knowledge base construction, and workflow orchestration. This platform enables partners to develop sophisticated AI applications through zero-code and low-code solutions, dramatically reducing development barriers while accelerating time-to-market for commercially viable intelligent solutions.

The conference also marked the official launch of "Tongtong Huigou," the company's enterprise procurement marketplace. This B2B platform connects 50,000 suppliers with millions of corporate buyers, building upon the success of the company's Partner Service Plan introduced at last year's conference. Since its inception, China Unicom's procurement ecosystem has served over 40,000 enterprises, facilitated transactions exceeding 130 billion yuan ($17.9 billion) annually, and improved order processing efficiency by 15 percent.