China Mobile to double down on AI investment

China Mobile is pushing forward a comprehensive upgrade of the company's "AI plus" initiative, aiming to double investment into artificial intelligence as part of its broader push to develop new quality productive forces and support China's modernization.

Yang Jie, chairman of China Mobile, said with AI as the strategic centerpiece, China Mobile aims to serve as a supplier, aggregator, and operator of AI, accelerating the integration of AI across industries to generate greater economic and social value.

By the end of 2028, China Mobile plans to double its total investment in AI and establish the country's largest and most technologically advanced intelligent computing infrastructure. This includes exploring 100,000-card AI computing clusters and achieving 100 EFLOPS of intelligent computing power driven by China-developed AI chips, according to the company. 

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

China Mobile will also eye to elevate its self-developed Jiutian large language model into the top tier globally. Additionally, it will strengthen the supply of 15 high-quality industry datasets and cultivate a high-level AI talent pool to ensure secure and trustworthy AI development.

The company will also advance the coordinated development of 5G-Advanced and 6G technologies while deploying new connectivity capabilities such as low-altitude networking, integrated sensing and communication, and passive internet of things. These enhancements will strengthen uplink performance and build smarter optical networks to meet the massive connectivity and high-computing demands of embodied intelligence systems.