China accelerates construction of IoT, cloud computing infrastructure

BEIJING - China is continuing to build infrastructure for cloud computing and the internet of things (IoT) as the country's informatization entered an intellectual stage featuring data mining.

In 2018, China had over 700 million IoT connections with a market scale surpassing 1 trillion yuan, said Wang Qinmin, an official with e-government affairs.

In terms of cloud computing, the private cloud market scale reached 52.46 billion yuan ($7.6 billion) and the public cloud market scaled at 38.25 billion yuan, according to Wang.

Cloud computing and the IoT are not confined to the internet industry, and they are penetrating into traditional industries, including manufacturing, finance, communication and medicare, Zhang Feng, chief engineer with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology noted.

Last year, the overall scale of the cloud industry in China reached around 330 billion yuan, while that of the IoT industry exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan, according to Zhang.