China to See $4 Trillion in New Investment for Computing Power Network During 15th Five-Year Plan

Benefiting from the explosion of demand from AI intelligent computing centres, the "East Data, West Computing" initiative, and transoceanic submarine cables, the upstream optical fibre preform expansion cycle takes 18-24 months, leaving industry capacity supply tight, and fibre optic prices have been continuously raised significantly in 2026. Hollow-core fibre and ultra-low-loss G.654E high-end fibre are rigid demand for computing power backbones, and top-tier players have locked in orders through long-term agreements until 2028.

The NDRC held a press conference for July. A spokesperson of the NDRC stated that in H1, China’s pace of independent AI innovation accelerated, achieving rapid breakthroughs across multiple links of the entire industry chain. First, the computing power foundation was consolidated; the first fully homegrown 100,000-card AI supercluster was officially put into operation, and as of month-end June, the national intelligent computing power scale reached 2.8 times that of the same period last year. Second, model capabilities leaped forward; local companies such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI successively released multiple open-source large models with trillion-level parameters, total global downloads of domestic large models surpassed 10 billion times, and domestic models were rapidly adapted to domestic computing power chips. Third, factor mobility was vibrant; over 120,000 high-quality datasets were built, and a virtuous cycle of mutual reinforcement among computing power, models, and data took shape at a faster pace. Driven by coordinated efforts across all areas, AI became a surging source of economic growth momentum, and related sectors maintained high growth of over 30%.

OpenRouter previously disclosed that the global market share of Chinese models had overall surpassed that of US models by early June. As of July 26, Chinese models held approximately 63.5% of the market over the past 28 days, while US models held only 35.5%, accounting for two-thirds of the global market, with the gap further widening.