President Xi Jinping places great emphasis on infrastructure development, stressing the need to deploy new types of infrastructure with appropriately forward-looking planning. In the opening year of the 15th Five-Year Plan, regions across the country are seizing development opportunities, accelerating systemic deployment, and driving new infrastructure construction at full speed. In today's China, within just a few milliseconds, over 60% of the nation's cities can simultaneously connect to a single computing cluster. In the same span of time, data from Shanghai can race across thousands of miles to reach Guizhou; Guangdong and Gansu, far apart, are completing a cross-province computing power dispatch. The nationwide integrated computing power network now extends in all directions, and new infrastructure is building a solid foundation for China's high-quality economic development.

President Xi Jinping attaches great importance to the development of new infrastructure. He has not only formulated overarching plans for building a new infrastructure system — calling for "deploying infrastructure at an appropriately forward-looking pace that is conducive to leading industrial development and safeguarding national security" and "building a modern infrastructure system that is intensive, efficient, economically viable, intelligent, green, safe, and reliable" — but has also issued a series of specific directives on building China's strength in cyberspace, the digital economy, transportation, and energy. He has emphasized the need to "accelerate the development of high-speed, ubiquitous, space-ground integrated, cloud-network converged, intelligent, agile, green, low-carbon, secure, and controllable intelligent and integrated digital information infrastructure," providing ideological guidance and fundamental principles for advancing new infrastructure development in the new era.

The 15th Five-Year Plan Outline explicitly calls for moderately forward-looking construction of new infrastructure. Centered on supporting industrial upgrading and digital-intelligent development, it pushes forward the deployment, construction, and intensive and efficient utilization of new infrastructure. Key priorities include improving information and communications networks, deepening the scale deployment of gigabit optical networks and the construction of 10-gigabit optical networks, building a multi-tiered computing power facility system and a nationwide integrated computing power network, improving civil space infrastructure, and accelerating low-Earth-orbit satellite internet networking. In the opening year, new infrastructure construction across the country has pressed the fast-forward button, with a wave of key projects advancing rapidly and coming online one after another.

Data infrastructure is being accelerated and a nationwide integrated computing power network is being built with appropriately forward-looking planning. In Shanghai's Lingang, a data center deployed on the seabed is directly connected to an offshore wind farm, using natural seawater cooling and offshore wind power as its green energy source. This model — "offshore wind becomes electricity, electricity becomes computing power" — enables the data center's green energy supply rate to exceed 95%.

This undersea data center achieves network latency as low as 0.5 milliseconds for coastal cities, capable of serving AI inference, embodied intelligence, intelligent manufacturing, and other market applications demanding high real-time performance. It is the equivalent of setting the dining table right next to the stove — computing power and electricity are synergized, both consumed on site.

This year, such "wind-power-direct-connection" data centers will see accelerated deployment across coastal metropolitan regions including the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Bohai Economic Rim. This type of appropriately forward-looking, nationally integrated, intensive and efficient, green and secure, converged and empowering new infrastructure will form the digital foundation supporting the Digital China vision, new quality productive forces, and Chinese-style modernization.

(Video source: CCTV News Simulcast, May 10, 2026 edition)