China Telecom's Next 150,000 Servers Will Mostly Use Local Processors

Most years, China Telecom posts a tender for new servers to help it run the apps it needs to serve its hundreds of millions of customers. This year, its 150,000-plus orders will mostly go to domestic manufacturers who use local tech.

China Telecom is one of the big three state-owned telcos that dominate the Middle Kingdom's comms market. As of September 2024 the carrier claimed it served 442 million mobile subscriptions and 196 million wired broadband services. The massive firm also operates a public cloud, and numerous other services.

To make that all work, it needs servers – lots of servers. This year's tender calls for suppliers willing to make over 156,000 of the machines, and specifies 13 different designs.

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Most of those designs are "G-class" machines – the carrier's designation for locally designed machines produced by local manufacturers – including processor providers.

That's very much in line with Chinese policy to favor local tech.

The news isn’t all bad for non-Chinese bidders, because most of the servers use either the Arm or C86 architectures. Arm is of course a UK-based, Japanese-owned firm that licenses its processor designs, so it will see some cash. C86 is a Chinese x86 variant that, again, works under license.

But AMD and Intel are simply not in the picture for around 100,000 servers – a market they've had to themselves for decades in China and elsewhere.

Among China Telecom's server buys this year are machines running processors from local champion Loongson, which has developed an architecture that blends elements of RISC-V and MIPS.

The Yongfeng architecture, produced by Zhaoxin using IP derived from Via's x86 license, is also on China Telecom's list. So is the SW architecture from Chinese company Shenwei that is thought to use RISC concepts.

All of which leaves China Telecom with a very diverse fleet of servers – not an arrangement many organizations favor. China Telcom, however, operates in a country with a policy of developing a tech sector in hopes of encouraging a growing independence from imports.

Some members of that sector have won a place on China Telecom's server procurement panel: Lenovo, Inspur and H3C are listed, along with several smaller domestic players. ®