China has set an audacious national objective: grow the artificial-intelligence related industry to more than ¥10 trillion. That target, articulated by the National Development and Reform Commission at the annual NPC economic briefing, has prompted every one of the country’s 31 provincial administrations to plug AI into their 2026 government work plans, but with sharply differing emphases.
Beijing and Shanghai exemplify two distinct national approaches. Beijing is doubling down on fundamental research, regulation and standard-setting: it reports the largest pool of AI scholars in China, more than 1.5 million? — correction: 15,000 AI researchers and 216 registered large models, and has explicit plans to turn itself into a global AI innovation high ground with a core industry scale break-through of more than ¥1 trillion within roughly two years. Shanghai is leveraging financial firepower and ecosystem-building, hosting a national AI industrial investment fund and a ¥600.6‑billion (600.6亿元) vehicle, setting up an AI open-source community and youth venture funds to marry capital with entrepreneurship.
Industrial provinces are translating algorithms into factory-floor gains. Guangdong, with an already vast digital-economy base (reported at about ¥8 trillion in 2025), is pursuing ‘‘AI across the board’’ in manufacturing — from intelligent robots and embodied intelligence to brain-computer interfaces — and plans vertical, task-specific models to upgrade its supply chains. Jiangsu and Shandong have chosen diagnostic and scale-up strategies respectively: Jiangsu aims to run AI diagnostics across multiple advanced manufacturing clusters, while Shandong’s ‘‘Double Hundred’’ initiative targets 100 characteristic firms and 100 industry- or scenario-level models to drive wide deployment.
Other coastal and consumer-oriented provinces are chasing monetisation rather than pure tech. Zhejiang is positioning AI to turbocharge consumption, using local e-commerce and platform strengths to turn models into revenue-generating services. That commercial pragmatism complements the heavy-industry focus elsewhere and helps explain why provincial portfolios are shaping into different lanes rather than clones of a single national plan.
Midwestern and northeastern provinces are betting on niche advantages and compute capacity. Regions with less dense research ecosystems are building competitive moats in data infrastructure, sector specialisation or geography: Chongqing is upgrading a western compute scheduling platform, Anhui is integrating multiple classes of compute and has pledged an additional 17,000 P of “intelligent compute” capacity, Shaanxi points to dozens of model smart factories, and Guangxi is driving China–ASEAN cooperation with a ¥45‑billion (450亿元) three‑year push that includes language corpora and cross‑border testbeds.
The result is a quickly emerging, multi‑tier Chinese AI landscape: a few global‑scale R&D and capital hubs; a broader band of manufacturing and application centres; and a dispersed ring of specialised, resource‑oriented actors. That diversification increases resilience and experimentation but raises questions about duplication, energy and land demands for data centres, talent concentration in top cities, and the need for national coordination to ensure interoperability, standards and effective governance.