GUIYANG, Aug. 28 (Xinhua) -- China's data industry continued to expand rapidly in 2025, supporting the development of the fast-growing artificial intelligence (AI) sector, according to official data.
The scale of China's data industry reached 6.78 trillion yuan (about 1 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2025, up 15.7 percent year on year, showed figures released at the opening of the 2026 China International Big Data Industry Expo on Friday.
Data-related software products, including AI application software, and data resource products, including token services, had a combined output value of 4.99 trillion yuan, accounting for 73.6 percent of the industry's total.
As of this month, more than 126,000 high-quality datasets had been built nationwide, with a total volume exceeding 1,815 petabytes, an increase of more than 89 percent from March.
"AI development is heavily driven by data," said Liu Liehong, head of China's National Data Bureau. "Wherever AI advances, we push forward the construction and application of high-quality datasets."
The expo is being held in Guiyang, capital of southwest China's Guizhou Province. Guizhou is a key hub for China's national "East Data, West Computing" project. This national strategy operates similarly to a power grid, shifting the heavy data processing demands of China's economically bustling eastern coast to resource-rich western regions. Crucially, the project utilizes the western region's abundant green energy such as wind and hydropower, making it a major milestone in green technology and carbon reduction.
By late July 2026, Guizhou housed 50 key data centers, with total computing capacity reaching 176.57 EFLOPS. Nearly 98.4 percent of this capacity was dedicated specifically to AI-related computing.
EFLOPS, or ExaFLOPS, is a unit of computing performance, with each unit representing 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second.
Themed "Token: A New Path to Value of Data Elements," the expo has attracted 372 domestic and international companies and over 16,000 registered guests.
The rapid growth of China's data industry is backed by years of policy efforts. In 2019, China became the world's first country to formally recognize data as a factor of production, followed by the establishment of the National Data Bureau in 2023.
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