China will ratchet up resources to accelerate the building of basic systems for data and leverage innovative digital technologies to bolster industrial upgrading, part of a broader push to promote the high-quality development of the economy and foster new quality productive forces, said officials, company executives and experts.

Heightened efforts should be made to boost the deeper integration of the digital and real economies, vigorously develop the core industries of the digital economy, and advance the digital transformation of industries, said Qin Boyong, vice-chairwoman of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the country's top political advisory body.

Qin made the remarks at the opening ceremony of the China International Big Data Industry Expo 2024, which kicked off on Wednesday in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province.

She stressed the need to speed up the construction of basic systems for data and data infrastructure, press ahead with reforms related to the market-oriented allocation of data elements, use digital technologies to drive the urban digital transformation and the development of digital villages, and expand international cooperation in the digital economy domain.

Xu Lin, Party secretary of Guizhou, said the province will make more efforts to build intelligent computing industrial clusters with a key focus on artificial intelligence technology, nurture a batch of industry-specific large language models, push forward the construction of data centers and expand the application scenarios of data elements in more fields.

Often dubbed China's big data hub, the mountainous province of Guizhou is the country's first national big data comprehensive pilot zone, and has been promoting the big data industry as the backbone of the province's high-quality social and economic development.

Xu said that Guizhou's total computing power has reached 40 EFLOPS, making it one of the regions with the strongest intelligent computing capabilities nationwide. EFLOPS is a unit of the speed of computer systems, equal to one quintillion floating-point operations per second.

Liu Liehong, head of the National Data Administration, said the administration is working with relevant departments to study and formulate policies concerning the data industry, in order to unleash the value of massive data resources and improve the competitiveness of China's data industry.

"As a new type of production factor, data has been deeply integrated into various areas of the economy and society," Liu said, while emphasizing the significance of the cultivation of the data industry in fostering new quality productive forces and driving the country's high-quality economic growth.

Chen Zhongyue, chairman of China Unicom, said the company is beefing up efforts to promote the construction of new types of infrastructure, facilitate the development of next-generation wireless communication technology, and accelerate the industrial applications of its self-developed large language model, called Yuanjing.

Chen said the company has developed 35 industry-specific Yuanjing models, which have benefited urban governance, information consumption and industrial manufacturing, adding that more efforts are needed to make breakthroughs in the key technologies of big data and LLMs, and provide more intelligent, convenient digital services in Guizhou.

Qi Xiangdong, chairman of Chinese cybersecurity company Qi-Anxin Technology Group, said that as new cybersecurity-related challenges, such as privacy and data leakage, have appeared along with the development of AI and data sharing, safeguarding data security is important in bolstering data transactions and developing the digital economy.

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