Over recent years, China has seen exponential growth in HPC investments. Last week, a post from the China Daily points out that the country is not stopping there. The government has taken notice of cloud computing and is quickly ramping up funding for its cloud-based infrastructure.

According to IDC figures referenced in the article, China spent $285.8 million on cloud infrastructure last year – that's 10 percent of the global market. The numbers keep going up; future predictions from IDC show China's cloud investment will extend to just over one billion dollars by the year 2016.

Last year, the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology outlined the country's cloud computing roadmap, naming pilot and demonstration cities. According to Wu Lianfeng, associate vice president of IDC China,the cities of Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzen, and Wuxi were selected to host model cloud projects.

Aside from the current project cities, Wu mentioned that an additional eight cities and provinces had announced their own cloud computing strategies. If all plans pan out, the country could end up hosting in excess of 10 million cloud nodes valued at $270 billion.

Beyond these initiatives, a national cloud computing industry development plan was recently approved by the central government. Specific details have not been published yet, but there are already a number of cloud deployments in the country and a variety of use cases.

So far, four HPC-connected facilities have been built in Shenzhen, Jinan, Chengdu and Changsha. Workloads range from agriculture and telecommunications to weather forecasting. All four sites came online within a 14-month window.

Other developments have come from the Shibei hospital in Shanghai, where the country's first cloud for healthcare was established in March of 2011. Also, the Qingdao municipal government has partnered with Inspur Corp. to establish a cloud computing platform for e-government needs.

Given the evidence, it's no secret that the Chinese government considers cloud computing a chief driver of the IT industry and e-government. This stance was outlined in the country's 12^th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015).

While the message and numbers are impressive, a number of experts believe that China is not focusing enough resources on software development. The IDC survey backed these claims, reporting that only 30 percent of companies and organizations were able to deliver detailed explanations about their cloud applications.

If funding fails to spur application development, China's high dollar investments may be underutilized or go to waste.