Lyon: China launches a 2 trillion yuan national AI construction blueprint to provide growth momentum for infrastructure development and accelerate the domestic AI chip substitution process.

Lyon released a research report stating that, according to relevant news reports, the Chinese government is preparing to invest about 2 trillion yuan (approximately 295 billion US dollars) in the next five years to build a nationwide data center to strengthen the domestic artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and AI infrastructure development. The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) is one of the main government agencies responsible for drafting this blueprint, planning to establish an interconnected computing hub network in China, which will mainly be operated by state-owned enterprises such as China Mobile Limited (00941) and China Telecom Corporation (00728). The bank believes that this work will help integrate scattered regional resources and connect these dispersed data facilities into a cohesive network, accelerating China's application of AI. Lyon stated that the continuous emergence of agentic AI, physical AI, and multimodal applications such as text generation videos and text generation images will drive up the use of tokens. Due to the much faster consumption rate of tokens compared to the growth of computing power supply, the problem of computing power shortage is further exacerbated. In addition, influenced by US export controls and the accelerated adoption rate of domestic AI chips, the bank expects that the tight supply situation of mainstream high-end chips in China will continue. The bank believes that this AI construction blueprint and the surge in demand for artificial intelligence tokens will provide strong growth momentum for the development of China's AI infrastructure and accelerate the process of replacing domestic AI chips.