In Nansha in July, the heat wave is rolling, and even hotter than the weather is the rising digital economy landscape here. At a recent signing ceremony, with representatives from all parties dropping their pens, the domestically produced intelligent manufacturing base for computing power machines with a total investment of 4 billion yuan was officially announced as settled. This is not only the fourth billion dollar digital industry project in Guangzhou this year, but also marks a solid step forward for the Guangdong Hong Kong Macao Greater Bay Area in solving the bottleneck problem of domestic computing power. At the same time, the first city level exclusive domestic computing power and intelligence industry fund in China was unveiled on site, and the real investment provided a visible and tangible channel for the transformation of intangible data assets.

Nansha Manufacturing Computing Center

Entering Nansha Integrated Circuit Industrial Park, the future intelligent factory is poised to take off. This project with a total investment of 4 billion yuan is expected to have an annual output value exceeding 10 billion yuan after completion, and will become an important source of computing hardware in the Greater Bay Area. The project will collaborate with giants such as Huawei to deepen the research and mass production of high-performance servers and AI intelligent computing machines. In the past, enterprises engaged in data governance and large-scale model training were often constrained by the high cost of imported hardware and supply chain risks. Nowadays, relying on the policy of Nansha Free Trade Zone, the base can not only improve the domestic supply chain from chips to operating systems, but also provide independent and controllable integrated solutions for industrial manufacturing, biomedicine, and cross-border trade nearby. This means that the massive amount of government, industrial, and consumer data in the Bay Area will be collected and processed at the doorstep, greatly reducing the threshold for enterprise digital transformation.

Billion dollar fund injected with live water

Hardware implementation is just the first step, how can data truly flow? Guangzhou has come up with a new strategy - a data intelligence industry fund with a total scale of over 1 billion yuan. This is the first municipal fund in China that focuses on domestic computing power and data elements, adopting a government guided and social capital operation model. This funding will be precisely dripped into key areas such as digital new infrastructure, data ownership registration, privacy computing, and data finance innovation. Especially for the pain points of capital shortage faced by small and medium-sized enterprises, the fund will support data asset inventory and valuation through direct equity investment and supporting interest subsidies. It is like a financial link that connects computing power hardware investment and data product trading, bringing timely rain to innovative enterprises that hold high-quality data but suffer from financial shortages.

Building a data ecosystem

From a blank sheet of paper to a fully closed-loop system, Guangzhou's ambition goes beyond a single breakthrough. The dual drive of "project+fund" this time is aimed at building a three in one ecosystem of "computing power hardware+industrial capital+data elements". Next, Guangzhou will rely on this foundation to build an integrated government data asset inventory platform for the Bay Area, and open up lightweight tools to the city's manufacturing industry. At the same time, in conjunction with the Guangzhou Data Exchange, a special zone for characteristic industry data products will be established based on the Nansha computing power cluster to promote the normalization of on exchange trading of data assets in fields such as automobiles and logistics. With the gradual introduction of leading service providers such as data valuation and compliance testing, a full chain ecosystem covering rights confirmation, evaluation, circulation, and financing is accelerating in Nansha, providing a valuable reference for the market-oriented reform of data elements in China.Editor/Yang Meiling