Beijing is set to significantly expand its intelligent computing capacity in the second half of 2026 as part of China’s broader strategy to advance artificial intelligence and compete with the United States in the technology sector. The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology announced plans to add 50,000 petaflops of computing power, which would bring the city’s total capacity to more than 130,000 petaflops by year-end. One petaflop corresponds to one trillion calculations per second.
This target follows a substantial increase of 22,000 petaflops in the first half of 2026, raising Beijing’s available computing power to 82,000 petaflops. The expansion of computational resources is central to Beijing’s goal of becoming a national hub for AI innovation, supporting the integration of artificial intelligence into established industries to stimulate economic growth.
In addition to the hardware boost, Beijing plans to nurture an open-source ecosystem combining RISC-V, an open-standard chip architecture, with AI operating systems. This approach aims to create a comprehensive technology stack encompassing chips and applications, promoting alternatives to proprietary Western chip technologies like Arm and Intel’s x86.
The city is also preparing policies to regulate the governance, production, distribution, and application of tokens, which are foundational units used to measure and charge for AI services. To support token generation and efficient energy use, Beijing intends to build “token factories”—advanced AI data centers designed to maximize token output. These facilities are expected to facilitate practical AI applications across sectors including manufacturing, education, and tourism.
This initiative aligns with a nationwide push to expand China’s computing infrastructure amid surging demand for AI tokens. Official data indicates that daily token consumption across the country exceeded 140 trillion in March 2026, marking more than a thousandfold increase since early 2024. The first of these token factories in Beijing, Yihao, which was completed last month, reportedly achieves a daily output capacity of over 1.4 trillion tokens, with similar projects emerging nationwide.
Beyond domestic development, Chinese officials emphasize the importance of international cooperation in AI and digital infrastructure, particularly with countries in the Global South and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) partners. Ren Xianliang, secretary general of the World Internet Conference, highlighted at the digital Silk Road Development Forum in Xian the potential for such collaboration to drive growth in the digital and connected era.
Zhuang Rongwen, head of China’s cyberspace regulator, also underscored the opportunities for BRI economies through joint digital connectivity efforts and called for accelerated digital transformation across traditional sectors. The World Internet Conference, based in Beijing, plays a central role in promoting China’s approach to cyberspace governance and its vision for future internet development.