China is rolling out a campaign to sharply cut artificial intelligence computing costs for small businesses, as demand for processing power surges alongside a fresh round of price increases by domestic providers.

The country plans to build an “inclusive computing service network” – offering broad coverage, lower costs and improved service quality – to reduce barriers for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) seeking access to computing resources, according to a notice published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on its official website on Thursday.

Under the plan, the ministry will coordinate local telecom carriers and computing service providers to develop computing facilities – including data centres and integrated training and inference systems – close to national public service platforms for SMEs and specialised industrial clusters across the country.

The aim is to provide businesses with more readily accessible computing support.

It will also encourage providers to introduce more flexible pricing models – including billing based on the usage time of central processing units, graphics processing units or tokens – and to offer subsidies or vouchers for computing power.

The push comes as local AI and cloud service providers raise prices, partly due to rising costs of hardware such as AI chips and memory.