3 June 2026 In 2018, the Space Computing Working Committee of the China Computer Industry Association held its first meeting in Beijing, created under the leadership of the Department of Electronic Information of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technologies. Committee Chairman Wang Jianyu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said, which has already received applications from over 100 organizations, which include radiation resistant chips, computing equipment, power supply and thermal management systems, data transfer, satellite constellation infrastructure and launch services.
This is the second such committee, created after the establishment of the Professional Committee on Space Computing Power at the Space Computing Industry Conference 2026 year in the Yizhuang economic zone (Beijing). Unlike the first committee, which is more hardware oriented, The Professional Space Computing Power Committee handles the standards, applications and earth-space integration. The simultaneous creation of two departments with overlapping functions is a classic approach for China's industrial policy. In such a model, different state institutions take care of individual links of a single value chain.
The developments follow China's adoption of a new strategic 15th five-year plan in March, the space aspects of which include plans to create an integrated sky-earth-ground system with fusion communications, navigation, remote sensing and computing. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation is also calling for a gigawatt-scale space computing infrastructure for the same 2026-2030 period. These institutional and political frameworks are formed simultaneously with that, as a number of companies try to put computing power into orbit.
Although China is laying the institutional foundations, including industrial coordination, financing mechanisms and supply chain architecture, the gap between ambitions for serious orbital capabilities and actual hardware remains wide. Projects face challenges in such areas, such as thermal management and radiation-resistant computing equipment.
At the same time, China is making efforts to build up its satellite production capacity and greatly expand its launch options and payload capabilities with a growing number of new and reusable launch vehicles and expanding spaceports, making large-scale space infrastructure projects more feasible.
Source: https://spacenews.com