avetraptorlx63| China Mobile's 16.5 billion yuan server centralized procurement bid opening industry chain manufacturers switch computing power tracks
editor 2024-05-14 08:05:59 Nature 37
Liu Canbang, a reporter from the Securities Times
Following the identification of some successful candidates in early March, China Mobile recently announced a new batch of winning candidates for the 2024 centralized procurement project for PC server products.
Specifically, the candidate announcement on May 11 involves the winning results of 12 bid packages, including numbers 1, 2, 3, etc., the candidate announcement on May 13 involves bid package 21, and the eight bid packages numbered 6, 9, 11 have been publicized in the previous period. This also means that only bid package 10 has not yet been identified as the winning candidate for this collection by China Mobile.
Rough statistics show that the total amount involved in the above bid package is about 16.5 billion yuan (excluding tax), including tax quotation of about 19.1 billion yuan. It is worth mentioning that the collection scale of China Mobile PC server is the largest in recent years, a record high.
In terms of the number of winning bids, ZTE Corporation won the largest number of bids, with a total share of 11 bids, followed by Xinhua III and Kunlun Technology, both of which won 6 bids. Sichuan Hongxin and Tide Information have won a total of 5 bids.Avetraptorlx63He won the bid for companies including Changjiang Computing, Zhongke controllable, superfusion and so on.
The reporter noted that in this tender, some of the winning companies are the same actual controller or related parties, such as Ziguanghuashan and Xinhua Group, Kunlun Technology and superfusion, Wave Information and Wave computer, and so on. Overall, ZTE, Xinhua 3, a subsidiary of Ziguang, and superfusion are the biggest winners in this round.
In response to this tender of China Mobile, Shouchuang Securities previously pointed out that the bidding of operators, finance and other information innovation continues to be carried out, and the demand for domestic general-purpose chips continues to be strong, with Kunpeng and Haiguang taking the lead. In addition to general computing power, AI brings a new round of industrial opportunities, domestic AI computing power has a clear prospect, Teng chip, Haiguang DCU and other rapid development. With the development of the industry and the continuous development of Xinchuang, it is expected that the domestic GM and AI computing power will be further developed.
Industry insiders told the Securities Times e company that the server is the carrier of computing power, and the types of computing power are mainly divided into different levels, such as general arithmetic, intelligent calculation, and supercomputing. China Mobile's PC server bidding is mainly aimed at the deployment of general computing power.
In fact, China Mobile also issued a "2024-2025 New Intelligence Center procurement bidding announcement" on April 18, planning to purchase 7994 AI servers. According to previous estimates of procurement and tender quotations, the industry believes that the collection scale of China Mobile's AI server is expected to exceed 15 billion yuan, covering the 2024 and 2025 years.
China Mobile's emphasis on computing power is first reflected in the structure of capital expenditure. In 2024, China Mobile's total capital expenditure plan is 173 billion yuan, down 4% from last year, of which the calculation capital expenditure plan is 47.5 billion yuan, a certain increase over last year. The company said that the peak of 5G investment is over, 5G capital expenditure has fallen, but arithmetic investment is likely to increase further.
At the previous annual results presentation, China Mobile said that the company's general calculation will continue to grow, the proportion of intelligent calculation will gradually increase, and it is expected that the scale of intelligent calculation will reach 17EFLOPS (FP16) or above in 2024, accounting for about 40 per cent of the company's total computing power. The company actively implements the national project deployment of "calculation of the East and the West" and plans to build a number of super intelligent clusters, which will not only meet the needs of the company's artificial intelligence basic model and industry model training in the future, but also provide push and training numeral services for the society and enterprises.
At the end of last month, the message delivered at the first China Mobile Computing Network Conference showed that China Mobile inherited the "4+N+31+X" computing network layout, planned the overall layout system of the "Numax" computing center, and built the first batch of 12 computing centers in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area and other places, with the overall computing power reaching 11EFLOPS, realizing the basic coverage of the hub nodes of "calculating the East and the West".
The strategy of operators to add code layout in the field of computing power also has a direct impact on the strategic choice of suppliers, that is, the above many successful candidates, these manufacturers have to adjust the business structure, increase the layout of computing products.
ZTE Corporation is one of the typical cases. In its research, ZTE said that the company has been rooted in the domestic operator market for many years, has a deep understanding of the life cycle of wireless network construction, and is fully expected to enter a steady contraction after the peak of network construction scale. In recent years, the company has also continued to increase investment in transmission, fixed network, home terminals and other fields, and from 2021 began to establish the second curve development strategy, following the pace of cloud network transformation of operators' customers, and actively expand second curve products such as servers and data centers. Over the past three years, the company's performance structure has become more balanced and its ability to cope with change has been greatly enhanced.
Guotai Junan Securities believes that ZTE has launched products such as computing and computing servers and high-performance storage, and the company's continuous R & D investment and the integration of artificial intelligence and product ecology are expected to promote the development of computing business.
At the beginning of this year, Ziguang released Aofei Computing platform 3Avetraptorlx63.0, G7 series modular multi-heterogeneous computing servers, S12500 series AI computing cluster switches and other products. The company said that it will focus on "computing power × connection", speed up the upgrading of all-optical network solutions, further deepen the product layout of GPU servers, liquid-cooled servers, a new generation of storage, and computing power management and scheduling platform, consolidate the advantages of product combination, and give better play to the multiplier effect of the double cornerstones of computing power and connection.
Industry insiders told reporters that China Mobile PC server collection, x86 architecture is still high, when the next round of collection, domestic computing power is expected to exceed 50%. Minsheng Securities judged that the development of artificial intelligence is the general trend, and computing power has become the clearest direction, and the demand is expected to continue the high economic situation; in particular, the domestic arithmetic leader represented by Teng Teng continues to improve its own ability and continues to polish in products, ecology and other aspects, which is expected to lead the rise of domestic AI computing power.