Digital biz expansion prioritized

China will step up efforts to promote the construction of digital industrial clusters, accelerate the digital transformation of cities and cultivate a national integrated data market in 2025, as part of its broader push to facilitate the high-quality development of a digital economy and advance the building of a "Digital China", said the country's top data governance regulator.

Liu Liehong, head of the National Data Administration, said the transaction scale of China's data market is expected to exceed 160 billion yuan ($21.8 billion) in 2024, up more than 30 percent year-on-year.

Liu said that in 2025, the administration will continue to vigorously press ahead with the mega data project dubbed the "east-data-west-computing" and speed up the establishment of an integrated national computing network. By the end of the third quarter last year, the total number of data center racks in use surpassed 2.11 million, surging more than 100 percent year-on-year.

Liu made the remarks at a national data work conference in Beijing that concluded on Friday, saying that by the end of 2025, new computing power in major computing hubs will account for more than 60 percent of the country's total, and the use of green electricity is expected to exceed 80 percent.

The administration will make greater efforts to improve the basic systems for data to remove the bottlenecks that hinder the circulation and utilization of data elements, further promote the development and utilization of data resources — including public data and enterprise data — and expand the application scenarios for data in more fields this year.

The NDA also stressed the significance of promoting the in-depth integration of the real economy with the digital economy, developing new quality productive forces based on local conditions, bolstering the construction of data infrastructure, and deepening international cooperation in the data domain.

Ouyang Rihui, assistant dean of the China Center for Internet Economy Research at the Central University of Finance and Economics, said deepened reforms related to the market-oriented allocation of data should fully unleash the value and potential of massive data resources in 2025.

"As a new type of production factor, data have been rapidly integrated into various areas like production, circulation, consumption and social services, and are playing an increasingly vital role in bolstering industrial upgrades," Ouyang said, adding that data elements own the attributes of commodities, which could be effectively allocated through market evaluation and trading, so as to create huge economic and social value.

He said the country's latest push to promote high-quality growth in its data industry, as a crucial part of the digital economy, is conducive to accelerating the establishment of a national integrated data market, propelling the sharing, circulation, transaction and utilization of data, and fostering new growth drivers.

The NDA said China's total data output reached 32.85 zettabytes in 2023, up 22.4 percent year-on-year, while the added value of core digital economy industries accounted for 10 percent of GDP.

The NDA, the National Development and Reform Commission and two other government departments on Monday issued a guideline on boosting the development of the data annotation industry.

By 2027, the professionalism, intelligence and technological innovation capacities of the data annotation industry will be improved significantly, with the average annual compound growth rate of this sector surpassing more than 20 percent, said the guideline.

The data annotation industry is an emerging field including data selecting, classification, marking and quality inspection. Cultivation of the data annotation sector is of great importance in improving the quality of data supply and promoting the innovative development of artificial intelligence.

The National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center said revenue derived from China's data elements market is projected to rise to 198.9 billion yuan in 2025, with the compound annual growth rate surpassing 25 percent during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) period.

Zhu Keli, founding director of the China Institute of New Economy, said the country's accelerated layout in the data element market will provide solid support for the sustainable and healthy development of the digital economy, generate new business forms, models and services that are based on data, create more job opportunities and inject new momentum into economic growth.