Chinese state-owned data centres flush with artificial intelligence chips are tapping the expertise of technology groups to help bolster their multibillion-dollar investments as part of a nationwide effort to increase adoption of the fast-developing technology. Local governments have enlisted Merit Interactive and start-ups Infinigence AI and SiliconFlow to develop technology for the surge of AI data centres being created across China, according to people with knowledge of the matter and public documents. It shows how China is increasingly pooling resources from the private and state sectors — combining local government spending power with start-up tech talent — as part of a push to accelerate its network of AI computing infrastructure. “The bottleneck at the moment isn’t getting the chips but figuring out how to make them work in a cluster. This is really complicated work,” said one Beijing-based chip investor. The move comes after Chinese start-up DeepSeek captured the world’s attention last month with the latest in a series of AI model releases that showed similar performances to those of US rivals such as OpenAI and Google, but achieved on what appeared to be a bootstrapped budget. The Zhejiang-based company used engineering prowess to squeeze as much computing power as possible from its Nvidia GPUs, driving down the cost of model training and so-called inference, the process of calling upon large language models.

Full report : China is increasingly pooling resources from the state and private sectors, including startups like Infinigence AI, to accelerate adoption of AI data centers.