Two buyers ask the same question in the same week — what one unit of computing power costs — and leave with numbers that cannot be compared. One was quoted the theoretical maximum of a machine. The other was quoted what a model actually extracted from it.
That is not a sales problem. It is a missing definition, and China's standards system has just published one.
Key takeaways
- Three standards for distributed computing (分布式计算) — measurement, resource description and device requirements — took effect on 1 November 2026 (SAMR, 30 April 2026).
- GB/T 47514-2026 covers "measurement parameters and methods" only: it defines a unit, not a price or a benchmark score.
- 42 organisations drafted the measurement standard, including the national electronics standards institute, Tsinghua and all three state carriers.
- All three are recommended standards (GB/T). No operator is obliged to quote, contract or settle in the new unit.
- Provincial targets are written in petaflops, Hunan's at 12,000P by 2030, while buyers are billed in tokens the standards do not define.
Three texts, one date
On 30 April 2026 the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Standardization Administration published three standards; all took effect on 1 November. They are numbered 47502, 47514 and 47518, share a classification code (ICS 35.240), and are administered by one technical committee, SAC/TC 28, the information-technology committee.
Each does a different job. GB/T 47502-2026 sets technical requirements for computing devices — basic functions, data processing, storage and transmission. GB/T 47514-2026 is the measurement text, 32 pages, with a deliberate narrow scope: it "describes the measurement parameters and methods for compute in distributed computing" and applies to that measurement. GB/T 47518-2026, 40 pages, describes a resource formally in terms of computing, communication and storage units, applies to "scheduling, evaluation and optimisation", and cites the measurement standard as a reference.
Read together they supply the three things a compute market needs to trade: a unit, a description of what is sold, and a baseline specification for the hardware.
The vocabulary is shared. The device standard defines a computing unit as processors plus memory, a storage unit as persistent storage, and a communication unit as network gear — the same three units the description standard uses to say what a scheduler is buying.
These are engineering documents rather than policy statements, and the drafting list shows it. The measurement standard records 42 organisations, led by Beijing Information Science and Technology University and the China Electronics Standardisation Institute, alongside Tsinghua, the Southern Power Grid's digital arm, Inspur, Sugon, Cambricon, Ant Group and the National University of Defense Technology. All three state carriers appear — China Unicom directly, China Mobile and China Telecom through subsidiaries.
Peak is not a unit
The problem is old and specific. A chip's headline throughput is a specification; what a model gets out of a cluster is a measurement. The two diverge with memory bandwidth, interconnect, scheduling and software.
The China Electronics Standardisation Institute put a name to the gap in 2022, in a white paper with China Mobile and Huawei. It proposed "effective compute" (有效算力) and a single index, CUE, built as a geometric weighted average across real workloads — the argument being that a specification number describes quantity while a workload result describes quality (China Economic Net, 2 August 2022).
That was an institute proposal, not a national unit. A related national standard, GB/T 46346-2025, has set how a computing centre's capability is assessed since 5 October 2025 — but assessing a centre is not the same as defining the unit in a supply contract.
Why the unit decides who can audit
China now writes compute (算力) policy in three units that do not convert into one another.
- Plans are written in petaflops. Hunan's October 2026 AI plan targets more than 12,000P of intelligent compute by 2030.
- Contracts are metered in time — a card, an hour — because time is what an operator can meter without agreement on a unit.
- Bills are written in tokens (词元). National daily token use passed 140 trillion by March 2026 (National Data Administration).
A voucher, a subsidy or a cross-region dispatch platform priced "per unit of compute" needs the unit defined by the party paying rather than the party selling. That is what a measurement standard is for. It is also why the resource-description text matters as much as the measurement one: a scheduler comparing accelerators it did not buy needs a shared vocabulary to compare anything.
What the texts do not settle
Several things sit outside the published scope, and buyers should notice.
- No price. A method standard defines how to measure. It says nothing about what a measurement should cost.
- Precision is declared, not fixed. The device standard requires equipment to publish the data types it supports and operations per second for each; no text in the series designates one as the reference, so a petaflop still needs a qualifier.
- Reporting, not a threshold. Devices must expose utilisation, power draw and per-precision throughput through software interfaces — plumbing for a scheduler, not a minimum standard of efficiency.
- No obligation. GB/T standards are recommended. Procurement can cite them; nothing compels a cloud provider to publish rates in the new form.
- A visible boundary. The device standard states that it does not apply to space-borne computing — a scope line someone argued over, and a reminder that these are negotiated documents.
Honest limitations
I have read the published scope statements, page counts and drafting records on the national standards platform, not the full texts, which are sold. Nothing published shows whether any provincial voucher scheme, dispatch centre or cloud rate card has adopted the new unit. The 2022 CUE index is an institute proposal and is not the national method. Capacity figures such as the 24 GW of data-centre capacity forecast for end-2026 (SemiAnalysis, 25 September 2026) remain capacity, not measured output.
What readers can do now
- When a Chinese supplier quotes compute, ask which standard the number conforms to, and whether it is peak or sustained.
- Before comparing two vendors' petaflop figures, ask for one workload at two numeric precisions. The gap is usually larger than the price gap.
- In any compute contract, name the unit and the measuring party. A unit defined by the seller is a discount the buyer cannot audit.