China MIIT orders AI and 800G tech into new internet exchange centers

MIIT’s new guidance is a reminder that China’s AI strategy is as much about plumbing as it is about models. By mandating that national internet exchange centers incorporate AI, 400G/800G optical transport, IPv6+ features, privacy computing and even quantum links, Beijing is hard‑wiring intelligence and high‑bandwidth, low‑latency fabric into the country’s core network.([chinanews.com.cn](https://www.chinanews.com.cn/cj/2025/12-30/10542749.shtml?utm_source=openai)) That matters because large‑scale training and deployment of advanced models increasingly depend on moving vast amounts of data between clouds, regions and edge devices without bottlenecks or security gaps.

For the race to AGI, this is an infrastructure play: smarter, denser exchange points reduce frictions around cross‑region compute pooling, federated training and data‑center interconnects. It also embeds AI for traffic engineering, anomaly detection and routing optimization deep in the network stack, giving Chinese operators room to experiment with AI‑defined networking at scale.([finance.people.com.cn](https://finance.people.com.cn/n1/2025/1230/c1004-40635621.html?utm_source=openai)) While these policies don’t directly create new models, they lower the cost and latency of experimenting with more distributed and interactive AI systems, from nationwide agent swarms to real‑time digital twins—capabilities that will matter as we approach more general forms of machine intelligence.