Beijing is ramping up its drive for technological self-sufficiency through allocating millions of US dollars to subsidies that will help enhance its artificial intelligence (AI) supply chain, the South China Morning Post reports.
On Wednesday, the Yizhuang Development Zone, also known as the Beijing Economic and Technological Development Zone, unveiled a plan to establish a nationally leading AI industry ecosystem valued at 80 billion yuan (US$11 billion) by the end of this year.
This would rely solely on Chinese-made semiconductors and operating systems, along with open-source instruction set architecture such as RISC-V, according to the plan, which was announced on WeChat.
It would also see up to 20 million yuan in computing subsidies and a million yuan in funding allocated to data centres and AI start-ups.
[See more: China will ‘overtake the US in hi-tech and military manufacturing in a decade’]
A significant motive for the initiative is to domestically develop chips for AI training. Beijing also wants to integrate more Chinese-made technology into consumer electronics and use it for the likes of medical research, robotics and autonomous vehicles.
Washington has been tightening its control over the global chip market since 2019, when it put Huawei on a trade blacklist. Export restrictions on chips made by US manufacturers like Nvidia have continued to tighten ever since.
In response, Beijing has been investing heavily in its domestic semiconductor sector, which has achieved several important milestones in the past year alone – including the development of a 2D transistor that can operate 40 percent faster than those of US and European rivals made with silicon. (Transistors are tiny, electronic components that act as a switch or amplifier for electrical signals in semiconductor chips.)
According to a recent report from the Emerging Technology Observatory (ETO), a US think tank, China now leads the world in semiconductor research.
