Dec 12, 2025 14:00:00

China is building a 55,000km distributed AI network

Chinese state media reported that a massive distributed AI computing pool called

the Future Network Infrastructure (CENI) has been launched in China. This high-speed optical network spans 40 cities in China, stretching a total distance of approximately 55,000 km, which is longer than the circumference of the equator.

699 days ago, 1.6 hours later, a number of installations were carried out to 'pierce the limit', and our country's information and communication area's major national science and technology infrastructure was implemented.
https://www.stdaily.com/web/gdxw/2025-12/04/content_441822.html

China Launches 34,175-Mile AI Network That Acts Like One Massive Supercomputer
https://gizmodo.com/china-la%E3%80%80unches-34175-mile-ai-network-that-acts-like-one-massive-supercomputer-2000698474

According to a report by China's state-run Science and Technology Daily, on December 3, 2025, the data gateway at the Joint Research Center for the China's Eye 500m radio telescope at Guizhou Normal University was operated over the network of the Future Network Experimental Facility (CENI). The astronomical data observed by the China's Eye was approximately 72 TB. While it would have taken 699 days to transfer the data to another university data center using the conventional internet, the CENI system completed the data transfer in approximately 1.6 hours.

'The biggest advantage of this system is its efficiency,' said Liu Yunjie, chief director of the Future Network Experimental Facility project at the Chinese Academy of Engineering , China's top technology research institute. 'It will be revolutionary in scenarios that require extremely high real-time speeds, such as training large-scale AI models, telemedicine, and the industrial internet.'

On the same day as the China Heavenly Eye experiment, CENI passed national certification in Nanjing and officially went into operation.

After more than 10 years of planning and construction, CENI will cover 40 cities across China, with a total optical transmission distance of over 55,000 km. CENI will operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and will be able to run 128 different networks simultaneously, as well as test 4,096 different services simultaneously.

CENI is also expected to make a significant contribution to the field of AI. Liu said, 'Training a large-scale model with hundreds of billions of parameters across multiple domains requires more than 500,000 iterations. With CENI, a single training iteration takes only about 16 seconds. Furthermore, if the facility's deterministic network function is disabled and interference flows are introduced, the iteration time increases dramatically by more than 20 seconds per iteration. This means that using CENI with a deterministic network can shorten the training time of large-scale models by several months.'

Furthermore, in its 2014 plan for the development of major scientific infrastructure, China announced a project called ' East Data , West Computing.' This project aims to connect resource-rich areas in western China with areas in eastern China that have high demand for data and development. CENI has demonstrated its commitment to providing open support to a variety of fields, and is expected to realize wide-area collaboration in cutting-edge fields.

'CENI will provide a continuous impetus for accelerating China's digitalization and building it into a cyber powerhouse, and improving its level of technological self-reliance,' Science and Technology Daily said.