Inspur Unveils IDC Global Computing White Paper 

STUTTGART, Germany, July 15, 2022 — Inspur Information, a leading IT infrastructure solutions provider, launched the newly commissioned IDC white paper entitled, 2021-2022 Global Computing Index Assessment. This white paper examines the correlation influence between a country’s GDP, the digital economy and computing power. It shows that on average, for every 1-point increase in the Computing Index of the 15 key countries, the national digital economy and GDP will increase by 3.5‰ and 1.8‰, respectively. This correlation signifies the immense importance for countries and their economies to continuously advance their computing power capabilities in the digital economy era.

The global digital economy continues to grow steadily. As a key productivity factor in the digital economy era, computing power has become the core support and driving force for the development of the digital economy. This white paper shows that increased investment in computing power in a country or region can lead to economic growth, and this growth has a long-term multiplier effect. When the Computing Index is over 40 points, for every 1-point increase in Computing Index, the impact on GDP will increase 1.5 times, and this impact will grow to 3 times when the Computing Index is greater than 60.

From the perspective of national rankings, most countries have improved their computing power scores. The Assessment results show that the United States and China rank as the top two with 77 points and 70 points respectively. The scores of the rising countries are between 40 and 55 points, including Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and 7 others. Those with scores lower than 40 points are startup countries, including India, Italy, Brazil and 6 others.

From the perspective of industry rankings, the top 5 industries pertaining to global computing power are the Internet, finance, manufacturing, telecommunications and government. These industries are increasing their investment in artificial intelligence, and industries that have already made large investments in computing power are also investing in emerging technologies. The Internet industry in particular, actively embraces emerging technologies and leads the world in computing power. The financial industry is accelerating artificial intelligence usage to support business innovation and development. The digital transformation of the manufacturing industry is advancing with more intelligent manufacturing and promoting the construction of digital factories. The telecommunications industry uses computing power to optimize internal management and empower external business innovation.

From the perspective of computing power, artificial intelligence and edge computing have become important forces for market growth. According to the white paper, from a comprehensive perspective of the 15 countries, spending in artificial intelligence has increased from 9% in 2016 to 12% of total computing power spending. It is expected to reach 25% by 2025. As a platform-based technology, edge computing provides important carrying capacity for emerging technologies such as 5G, Internet of Things, robotics, and artificial intelligence. In the next five years, the global investment in edge computing power will grow much faster than core computing power. By 2025, the proportion of global edge computing server spending will increase to 24.9% of total server spending.

The digital economy and the real economy are both accelerating, and the value of computing power for industrial transformation and national competitiveness has been recognized worldwide. The white paper encourages countries to invest more in computing power infrastructure, as well as strengthening international cooperation and shared development in computing power.

The Global Computing Power Index Assessment analyzes 15 countries spanning six continents, and comprehensively evaluates the computing power levels of various countries in four dimensions: computing capacity, computing efficiency, application level and infrastructure support. The white paper draws nine core views of the impact of computing power on economic growth from the perspective of statistical data and economic theory.

Core Views

Insight 1: Computing power is the core of productivity in the digital economy era

• On average, for every 1-point increase in the Computing Index of the 15 key countries, the national digital economy and GDP will increase by 3.5‰ and 1.8‰, respectively.
• The computing power index model consists of four dimensions: computing capacity, computing efficiency, application level, and infrastructure support. Computing capacity reflects the overall level and focus of the country’s investment in computing power. Computing efficiency reflects the utilization level of computing power. Application level aims to consider the boost from the application of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things in a country’s computing power, reflecting the potential of future computing power development. Infrastructure support is designed to consider the sustainability of a country’s future computing power development.

Insight 2: Global investment accelerates, Germany was ranked Top 5

• Evaluation results show that the US and China rank first and second, taking leading positions globally. In the past year, driven by the demand for digital transformation, Germany’s computing power level has improved rapidly, ranking among the top 5 worldwide.
• The gap between leading countries and startup countries is widening, and the difference between the average points in the national computing index between startup and rising countries is narrowing.

Insight 3: AI computing power reflects a country’s cutting-edge computing power

• Looking at the 15 countries, AI computing power spending has increased from 9% in 2016 to 12% of total computing power spending, and is expected to reach 25% by 2025.
• Specialized chips and AI servers have become the focus of the market. Europe accounted for 14.7% of the world’s AI computing market, ranking third globally.
• Countries around the world are stepping up efforts in AI. Japan has introduced the “Cross-Ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP) Phase II”. France has launched a national strategy for AI, investing additional 2.2 billion EUR. This strategy also clarifies AI applications in the four areas of healthcare, environment, transportation, and national defense.

Insight 4: Acceleration of digital technology and deep integration of vertical industries to optimize innovative application scenarios

• Global industry computing power ranking Top 5: Internet, finance, manufacturing, telecommunications, government. Industries that invest in computing power also invest in the application of emerging technologies. Among them, the Internet, finance, and manufacturing are at the forefront of computing power and AI investment.
• Finance accelerated the construction of intelligent platforms to improve risk management and control capabilities. The use of artificial intelligence mainly focuses on two aspects: intelligent customer service and risk management. The voice recognition of intelligent customer service has increased from an average recognition rate of 55% to over 85%.
• Manufacturing actively promotes the construction of digital factories. It is one of the traditional industries with the highest level of computing power in the world, and it is the industry with the largest investment in the two emerging technologies of the Internet of Things and robotics. Germany has a strong industrial foundation and is playing a leading role in the digital transformation of the global industry.
• Telecoms are using computing power to optimize their BSS systems internally to increase customer stickiness, and optimizing their OSS systems to improve operation and maintenance efficiency. Externally, it provides support for value-added services such as smart transportation, smart retail, Internet of Vehicles, gaming & entertainment, and AR/VR applications.

Insight 5: AI Computing Accelerates Discovery & Innovation from Data

• In agriculture, artificial intelligence technology is used to analyze maps to identify problem areas for crops to optimize yields.
• In the medical field, artificial intelligence technology is applied to the treatment and diagnosis of various diseases such as genetic syndromes, lung and breast cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc. AI technology is used to accurately interpret medical images and assist physicians to accurately diagnose breast cancer and tuberculosis from massive X-ray photos, and recognize and decipher signs of diseases using images of tissue sections.
• In the field of scientific research, AI computing assists the development of vaccines and drugs for target selection and validation, compound screening and optimization and other research and development links, transforming from traditional “manual trial and error” to a computationally assisted mode, maximizing the shortening of the development cycle and accelerating the process of putting effective drugs into use. The use of artificial intelligence to study the structure of protein folding and the detection and identification of antimicrobial resistance genes have also become major areas of study.
• AI computing accelerates the genetic sequencing analysis of suspected cases and significantly shortens the genetic sequencing analysis of suspected cases, significantly reducing contract tracing time.

Insight 6: Adoption of emerging technologies is a core driver of future IT spending

• The application of emerging technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, blockchain, and robotics is the core driver of future IT spending.
• In 2020, the US and China are at the forefront in terms of total spending on AI applications, with a high growth rate of 27.9% and 34.7% respectively, and that momentum is expected to continue over the next five years. Germany’s spending on the Internet of Things and blockchain is also growing rapidly, driving a 16.1% jump in computing application level in the country.

Insight 7: Massive models accelerate the intelligent transformation of traditional industries

• Fine-tuning large-scale pre-training models to serve specific downstream AI tasks has become an industry consensus, empowering all walks of life, and bringing positive impacts in fields such as law, medical care, and education.
• AI companies around the world are actively developing and commercializing technologies for large-scale pre-trained models. In the United States, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other institutions have formed large models with hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters such as GPT-3, Switch Transformer, and MT-NLG.
• Inspur’s Yuan 1.0 is a massive model with 245.7 billion parameters that has been trained on a dataset of more than 5TB.

Insight 8: Edge computing has become an important force driving the growth of the global enterprise infrastructure market

• Investment in edge computing power will grow much faster than core computing power over the next five years. By 2025, worldwide spending on edge computing servers will account for 24.9% of total servers.
• European countries and companies see edge computing as a key driver of digital transformation across Europe. Nearly 30% of European companies planning to start using edge computing technology in the next two years. Transport/logistics, manufacturing and energy will be the leading industries.

Insight 9: Computing power evolves towards green

• The industry is implementing a variety of measures to reduce carbon emissions in data centers, including using liquid cooling and other technologies to improve heat dissipation efficiency, introducing new energy technologies such as wind power and solar power, upgrading operation and maintenance management processes through AI/ML technology, and adopting new chip architectures to achieve higher computing power output per unit of power consumption.
• IDC believes that liquid cooling solutions will see wider adoption in the data center market, with at least 40% of systems with high computing power in data centers to be equipped with liquid cooling technology solutions by 2023.
• Liquid cooling technology can be divided into two categories: direct liquid cooling and immersion cooling. Cold plate liquid cooling is the main form of direct liquid cooling solution. Benefiting from cost-effectiveness and scalability based on existing cooling systems and data center infrastructure, direct liquid cooling solutions will be more widely used in the data center market, especially by enterprise users.

Click here to download the 2021-2022 Global Computing Power Index Assessment.

About Inspur Information

Inspur Information is a leading provider of data center infrastructure, cloud computing, and AI solutions. It is the world’s 2nd largest server manufacturer. Through engineering and innovation, Inspur Information delivers cutting-edge computing hardware design and extensive product offerings to address important technology sectors such as open computing, cloud data center, AI, and deep learning. Performance-optimized and purpose-built, our world-class solutions empower customers to tackle specific workloads and real-world challenges. To learn more, visit https://www.inspur.com.

Source: Inspur Information