As China enters the inaugural year of its 15th Five-Year Plan, the race for supremacy in the 'AI+' era has moved beyond the traditional tech hubs of the eastern seaboard. On March 25, a high-level delegation from the Chengdu Metropolitan Circle traveled 2,000 kilometers to Hangzhou, seeking to forge a strategic alliance with the Yangtze River Delta’s most innovative firms. This cross-regional courtship represents a sophisticated effort to integrate the cutting-edge research of the east with the vast computing power and industrial 'scenarios' of the west.
Chengdu, long celebrated for its lifestyle and consumer market, is repositioning itself as a vanguard of 'New Quality Productive Forces.' The city has designated artificial intelligence as its 'No. 1 Innovation Project,' fostering a core industry scale that now exceeds 150 billion RMB ($21 billion) with an annual growth rate topping 35%. By leading a four-city cluster including Deyang, Meishan, and Ziyang, Chengdu is offering a consolidated investment landscape that emphasizes vertical integration across 9 key supply chains.
The logic of the Chengdu-Hangzhou axis is one of profound complementarity. While Hangzhou-based leaders like Unitree Robotics excel in 'embodied intelligence' and algorithmic innovation, the Chengdu Metropolitan Circle offers what the crowded east lacks: massive, state-subsidized computing infrastructure and diverse application grounds. With its 'Dual Centers' of supercomputing and intelligent computing, Chengdu provides a 20,000P computing base, essential for the data-hungry large models that define modern AI.
Policy incentives are being used as a 'strong magnetic field' to pull eastern firms westward. The local government has rolled out 'computing vouchers,' professional industrial parks, and multi-billion-yuan industry funds to lower the threshold for tech migration. For firms in the Yangtze River Delta, the appeal lies in the triple fusion of talent, lower operational costs, and the 'homogenization' of the Chengdu-Deyang-Meishan-Ziyang cluster, which allows for seamless regional scaling that was previously fragmented by administrative boundaries.