Tenders of the Chinese telecom giant China Telecom can serve as a kind of indicator of sentiment in the local market. According to The Register, in 2024, most of the 156 thousand servers, according to the company’s requirements, will be from local manufacturers using “home” technologies.
China Telecom is one of the “big three” state-owned telecom providers that dominate the Chinese communications services market. As of September 2024, the operator had 442 million mobile subscribers and 196 million broadband Internet users. In addition, the company operates a public cloud, as well as many other services.
To ensure the operation of the entire infrastructure, a lot of equipment is required. This year we are talking about supplies of 156 thousand serers, in a total of 13 configuration options. In most cases, we are talking about “G-class” machines – servers developed and produced in China, including locally produced chips. This fits into the overall government policy of supporting local technologies. However, companies from other countries will also make money, since most servers use chips based on Arm or C86 architecture – a licensed version of x86.
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One way or another, AMD or Intel chips will not be suitable for approximately 100 thousand servers. Among the announced purchases are chips produced by the Chinese Loongson. The list of approved China Telecom CPUs also includes Zhaoxin processors based on the Yongfeng architecture – they are created using VIA intellectual property (x86 license). RISC processors from Shenwei (Sunway) will also be used.
Some market participants have already won a place on China Telecom’s purchasing list: we are talking about Lenovo, Inspur and H3C, as well as smaller local manufacturers. In the spring of 2024, it was reported that Chinese telecom operators were ready to spend billions of dollars to purchase a huge number of AI servers.