China Mobile plans over RMB500 billion of procurement in 2027, including more than RMB100 billion for computing, which sets the scale of orders open to data-center suppliers.
China Mobile plans to invest more than RMB100 billion (US$15 billion) in computing infrastructure in 2027, Chairman Chen Zhongyue said on November 6, Caixin Global reported. Caixin says the spending targets gigawatt-scale data centers, sites sized by their electrical capacity, as demand for AI computing grows. Chen spoke at an industry conference, and Caixin reported him as saying computing power became the biggest source of the company’s incremental investment this year.
The conference was the 2026 Mobile Network Conference in Guangzhou, which runs from November 5 to 7, according to AASTOCKS. It adds the wider budget: China Mobile expects total procurement above RMB500 billion in 2027, including more than RMB100 billion each for computing power and for terminals. The reports describe the figures as plans stated by the chairman at the conference; they are not presented as figures from a company filing.
For anyone tracking AI infrastructure demand in China, the figures show the country’s largest wireless carrier putting more than RMB100 billion into computing in a single year. They also give data-center suppliers a published order envelope to plan against.
Computing has become the largest new line in the investment budget
Chen’s description of computing as the largest source of added investment fits the company’s earlier plans. Yicai reported in March that China Mobile’s 2026 capital spending plan of RMB136.6 billion includes RMB37.8 billion for its computing network, up 62.4% and about 28% of the total. A year earlier, CEO He Biao told the company’s 2024 results briefing that it planned to invest RMB37.3 billion in computing in 2025, or 25% of capital spending, with investment in inference capacity left uncapped and tied to market demand, according to IT Home’s March 2025 report. The two plans carry different labels, "computing" in 2025 and "computing network" in 2026, and the sources do not say how the lines relate. Both show computing taking a growing share of the budget.
The 2027 number is therefore more than two and a half times the 2026 computing-network line. The comparison needs care. The reports do not say whether the RMB100 billion "computing power investment" counts the same items as the 2026 network capital spending. A reader should treat the ratio as a signal of direction, and wait for the company’s own definitions.
Gigawatt-scale parks and 10,000-chip clusters carry the build-out
According to CLS, which reported Chen’s remarks on the day, China Mobile began construction of three gigawatt-scale computing parks this year and will build two more next year, bringing the total to seven, which implies two earlier parks that the report does not identify. Chen also said the carrier has built several clusters of 10,000 accelerator cards, the chips that train and run AI models, and is now building several ultra-large clusters. He said its intelligent computing capacity will double in each of the next two years.
The reports do not break down which chips will fill the new clusters or how the budget splits between parks, servers and power. Those allocations will determine which suppliers benefit.
Rival carriers and equipment suppliers will test the plan
China Unicom is also pushing into computing. EastFrontier reported on October 30 that China Unicom saw its nine-month profit fall 33.6% even as computing revenue grew 12.2%. That pairing points to a tension for carriers: computing spending rises quickly while the revenue it generates builds more slowly.
The terminal side of the budget is also large, and it sits in the same procurement total as computing. According to IT Home, republished on ifeng, China Mobile aims to sell more than 100 million terminals in 2027, alongside the more than RMB100 billion of terminal procurement and sales.
The next hard data will come from China Mobile’s full-year results, where the company can show how much of the RMB100 billion counts as capital spending and how much of its computing capacity is already contracted to customers. Supplier announcements of new China Mobile data-center and cluster contracts would show the budget turning into orders, and any update to the seven-park schedule would show whether construction is keeping pace with the doubling target.