Beijing Boosts AI Computing Power and Token Economy Amid US Tech Race

Beijing is ramping up its computing power and unveiling new policies to boost the city’s “token economy”, as China accelerates AI adoption across key industries in its tech race with the US.

The Chinese capital aims to add another 50,000 petaflops of intelligent computing power in the second half of 2026, pushing its total capacity over 130,000 petaflops by the end of the year, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology said at a press briefing on Tuesday.

One petaflop is equal to 1 trillion calculations per second.

The aggressive target follows a 22,000-petaflop boost in the first six months of the year, which lifted the city’s current supply to 82,000 petaflops, according to data from the local technology agency.

The surge in compute capacity underpins Beijing’s ambition to establish itself as a national “AI highland”, supporting the country’s broader push to integrate artificial intelligence into traditional industries to spark new economic growth.

Beijing also aims to foster an open-source “RISC-V + AI OS” ecosystem.

By pairing AI-focused operating systems with RISC-V, an open-standard chip architecture seen as a key alternative to proprietary Western tech like Arm and Intel’s x86, the city hopes to build a full-stack framework spanning chips and applications.