(Yicai) Nov. 16 -- China Bester Group Telecom said it has secured a CNY346 million (USD47.7 million) contract to provide artificial intelligence computing power services to a Beijing-based firm. Its shares touched an all-time high before ending the day lower.

Bester, which has been transforming itself from a telecom services provider in recent years, penned the one-year deal with Zhongke Xinyuan Technology, it said yesterday.

Bester will provide Zhongke Xinyuan with technical services for 1,920 peta floating-point operations per second at CNY180,000 (USD24,814) a unit. It will supply 640 PFLOPS before year-end and the rest possibly before next March.

The deal comes just three weeks after Wuhan-based Bester announced it would next year provide computing services to Wildlook Tech, a Singaporean mobile advertising company. The service fees total USD20 million for 800 PFLOPS, or USD25,000 a unit.

Bester’s shares [SHA: 603220] jumped as much as 5.6 percent to CNY50.63 (USD7) in Shanghai today before closing down 1.8 percent at CNY47.07 apiece. All of China’s main stock indexes fell. Bester’s stock has surged almost five times in value since the beginning of the year, boosted by the boom in AI.

Editor: Emmi Laine