Computational Sovereignty: An Analysis of China’s Computing Capacity and Civil-Military Integration by 2026

China's military computing capabilities have developed rapidly over the past decade, and the country is committed to transforming computing power into combat power—a goal that, in the context of smart, information-based warfare, elevates this resource to one of the fundamental modern combat capabilities.

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According to data from the March 2026 report by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), Beijing has consolidated a total computing capacity of 962 EFlops, accounting for approximately 21% of the global total, marking an annual growth rate of 73%. In this geopolitical landscape, although the United States maintains global leadership with 44% of total computing power and 46% of intelligent computing power, China has responded with a strategy of forced domestication and military-civilian integration, under which domestic brands now dominate 75% of the domestic server market and domestic operating systems such as openEuler account for 50% of new installations. Intelligent computing infrastructure now accounts for 81% of the national infrastructure, with a capacity of 782 EFlops, providing the necessary foundation to support the development of big data and artificial intelligence technologies to facilitate the sharing of tactical data among the various branches of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Market intelligence and the geography of industrial power reveal a China that has transformed its provinces into unrivaled manufacturing clusters to support both its economy and the modernization of its defense sector. The province of Guangdong alone produces nearly 12 million servers a year, accounting for 56% of the national supply and investing over 170 billion yuan in research and development across Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Huizhou. This strength rests on the capacity of Jiangsu, which churns out 140 billion integrated circuits annually, accounting for 31% of the national share, and on Beijing’s dominance in the software sector, where revenue has exceeded 3 trillion yuan. The creation of cloud centers in inland regions such as Ningxia and Gansu—where the Zhongwei and Qingyang nodes have achieved occupancy rates exceeding 90%—enables the PLA to promote military cloud platforms for war simulations and strategic intelligence analysis, leveraging power usage effectiveness (PUE) values below 1.1.

In the field of quantum computing, China has achieved a major milestone by establishing superiority in both superconducting and quantum optical systems—a development that will lead to revolutionary changes in cryptography and high-complexity simulation. The Tianmu superconducting quantum prototype has achieved a quantum volume in the millions, outperforming IBM’s Western Osprey systems by a factor of five. This technology is being integrated into the PLA’s intelligent decision-making systems to develop new battlefield command platforms designed for analyzing war simulations and rapid decision-making during combat. The computing power is also being used to integrate logistics information systems, improving the precision of joint operations across land, sea, air, space, and electromagnetic domains.

Technology intelligence, however, highlights a critical vulnerability linked to U.S. restrictions on the procurement of high-performance computing chips—a setback that has prompted Beijing to focus on domestic processor production. To counter the inability to access the most sophisticated EUV lithography machines, China is investing in advanced CoWoS-L packaging to pair dies produced with less advanced processes and achieve aggregate performance comparable to top-tier chips. At the same time, the country is promoting the open UALink interconnect standard to break the monopoly of Nvidia’s NVLink system and enable the creation of AI clusters based on domestic processors such as Huawei’s Ascend or Baidu’s Kunlun. The success of the DeepSeek-R1 model also demonstrates that Beijing can compensate for the limited availability of cutting-edge hardware with superior algorithmic efficiency, capable of reducing inference costs to 1/30th of those of Western benchmarks.

China’s development strategy emphasizes the modernization of defense technology through the use of cutting-edge civilian capabilities such as high-speed networks and big data technologies. The national “East Data West Computing” network ensures latencies of less than 20 ms between strategic inland nodes and coastal command centers, providing the coordination speed essential for joint operations. High-tech weapons systems require increasingly powerful computing capabilities for material selection, aerodynamic simulation, and the design of precision guidance technology. In summary, China now possesses a massive, centrally coordinated computing infrastructure that acts as a force multiplier, working to transform the advantages of algorithms into advanced, unmanned combat capabilities within a fully computerized environment.

Read also: Quantum Technologies and National Security: State of the Art and Industrial Dynamics in the People's Republic of China