Major telecom operator China Unicom has said more than one-third of its planned capital expenditure in 2026 will be allocated to computing power development.

The announcement came as the company released its annual results on Thursday, reporting that, for the 12 months ending Dec 31, it amassed operating revenue of 392.22 billion yuan ($56.89 billion), up 0.68 percent year-on-year, while net profit rose 0.98 percent to 20.82 billion yuan.

The operator has said that, this year, its capital spending is expected to reach around 50 billion yuan, with over 35 percent earmarked for computing power, which has been identified as one of the company's four core strategic tracks. In 2025, revenue from its computing power business accounted for 15.4 percent of total revenue, up 1.1 percentage points from a year earlier.

Dong Xin, chairman and CEO of China Unicom, said computing power is playing a key role in driving innovation and upgrading the company's revenue structure.

"Computing power will be at the core of our future development, and we are prepared to moderately advance the construction of computing infrastructure," Dong said.

In 2025, the company stepped up its computing resource deployment, expanding rack capacity to over 1.1 million units, building seven 100-megawatt-grade AI data centers and reaching an intelligent computing capacity of 45 EFLOPS. It also added more than 9,000 kilometers of optical fiber.

As well expanding its computing networks, Dong said the company has developed its cloud-network convergence to optimize resource allocation and scheduling. These efforts are aimed at enhancing the competitiveness of Unicom Cloud and supporting the development and application of big data and artificial intelligence technologies.

The annual report showed that revenue from strategic emerging industries accounted for more than 86 percent of the total, while AI-related revenue surged more than 147 percent year-on-year. Revenue from data centers reached 28.1 billion yuan, up 8.5 percent, while Unicom Cloud revenue rose 5.2 percent year-on-year.

At the global level, China Unicom reported overseas revenue of 13.6 billion yuan, up more than 9 percent. The company said it has enhanced backbone network capacity across the Asia-Pacific, Asia-Americas and Asia-Africa-Europe routes, while promoting smart home products overseas and advancing flagship projects such as smart manufacturing in ASEAN, smart warehousing in the Middle East, smart mining in Africa and smart ports in Europe.

China Unicom's shares hovered around HK$7.3 at midday on Friday, little changed from the previous session.