MIIT Plan Targets 9,800 Eflops of Intelligent Compute by 2030

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has published a five-year development plan for the information and communications sector that targets 9,800 eflops of intelligent computing capacity by 2030, up from a 2025 baseline of 1,590 eflops, backed by 3.8 trillion yuan in cumulative information infrastructure investment over the period.

The 15th Five-Year Plan for the information and communications industry was posted publicly on September 7, 2026, through the ministry’s Information and Communications Development Department. The document itself is dated August 12, 2026, and covers the 2026–2030 period. It lays out 13 headline indicators spanning overall industry development, innovation, green growth, infrastructure, and application adoption, alongside 26 key tasks organized into six priority areas.

Computing Capacity Targets

The plan’s intelligent computing figure is expressed in eflops, a unit equal to one quintillion floating-point operations per second. The target table sets the 2030 goal at 9,800 eflops against the 1,590 eflops recorded for 2025, and pairs it with an advanced storage capacity target of 1,700 exabytes by 2030, up from 540 exabytes in 2025. New large and hyperscale computing facilities are expected to run at a power usage effectiveness below 1.2, compared with 1.25 in 2025.

On deployment, the plan calls for accelerating construction of a nationwide integrated computing power network built around a multi-tier system of hubs, regional facilities, and edge sites. It directs the orderly deployment of intelligent computing clusters at the 10,000-card scale and at scales of 100,000 accelerator cards or more, with inference computing facilities deployed as needed for specific applications. The document also calls for greater efforts to adapt infrastructure to domestically produced computing chips, and for exploratory research into space-based computing.

The current-state figures behind the growth target predate the plan. At a State Council Information Office press conference on July 20, 2026, Xie Cun, director of the ministry’s Information and Communications Management Bureau, said China’s intelligent computing capacity had reached 2,185 eflops at FP16 precision by the end of June 2026, up 177% from a year earlier, with an overall rack utilization rate of 71.4% across national computing facilities. Xie said the ministry had coordinated with other departments on high-quality computing buildout, including more than 70 high-capacity computing corridors linking national hub nodes over the past two years and a roughly 10% improvement in network performance between those hubs.

Investment and Industry Indicators

The plan’s cumulative information infrastructure investment line reads 3.8 trillion yuan for the five-year window, against 3.7 trillion yuan in the prior period. Xinhua’s report on the release lists the 13 indicators as including information and communications industry revenue of 4.1 trillion yuan by 2030 — about $604.8 billion at the agency’s conversion — and an average annual growth rate of 7% in total telecommunications business volume. The plan’s own table records 2025 industry revenue of 3.8 trillion yuan and raises the sector’s research and development intensity target from 4.7% to 4.8%.

The document organizes its work program around six areas: building information infrastructure ahead of demand, cultivating the information and communications industrial system, optimizing industry governance, strengthening network and data security capabilities, expanding integrated applications across production and daily life, and raising the sector’s level of global engagement. Within those areas sit 13 dedicated engineering boxes covering specific buildouts, from 5G-Advanced network scaling to computing-power market development.

Network, 6G, and Satellite Provisions

Beyond computing, the plan sets a 2030 target of 50 5G and 5G-Advanced base stations per 10,000 people, a 95% adoption rate for 5G services, and 320 million gigabit-and-above broadband subscribers, up from 240 million in 2025. It calls for 500,000 new 5G-Advanced base stations and for one million 50G-PON optical access ports, up from 20,000 in 2025. Mobile Internet of Things terminal connections are to exceed 3.8 billion.

On next-generation wireless, the document says commercial 6G services should be launched at an appropriate time. It directs continued 6G research and testing under the national IMT-2030 promotion group, including work on network-native AI, integrated sensing and communication, token-based communication, and satellite-terrestrial spectrum sharing, and it encourages industry participation in international 6G standards-setting.

Satellite and space-ground integration provisions call for coordinated high-, medium-, and low-orbit constellations, with individual low-orbit satellites exceeding 100 gigabits per second of capacity, plus direct-to-handset satellite services and deeper integration between 5G and the BeiDou navigation system. The plan also orders wider adoption of embedded SIM cards and orderly development of communications services that work without conventional network coverage.

Implementation rests on cross-department coordination, ministry-province linkage, and government-enterprise cooperation, with dynamic monitoring, a mid-term evaluation, and a final review of plan execution, according to the document.