China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), alongside six other key departments, has unveiled an ambitious roadmap to reshape the nation’s digital landscape. The 'Action Plan for Collaborative Development of Large and Medium-sized Enterprises in the Platform Economy (2026–2028)' seeks to dismantle silos between tech giants and smaller firms, specifically targeting the democratization of high-end computing power. This state-led initiative aims to create an open-sharing ecosystem, ensuring that the country's massive computational resources are not hoarded by a few, but distributed effectively to fuel small-scale innovation.
Central to the mandate is the concept of 'computing power interconnection' and the establishment of a national integrated monitoring and scheduling service. By pooling distributed computing resources and implementing centralized management, Beijing hopes to optimize resource allocation and lower the barriers for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to access AI capabilities. The plan specifically highlights the need to lower the cost of 'token' services—the fundamental unit of large language model usage—thereby fostering a more inclusive AI economy.
This policy shift comes as the Chinese AI sector undergoes a fundamental transition from model training to large-scale application inference. As the demand for localized AI deployment surges, the industry's focus is pivoting toward chip efficiency, software ecosystems, and system-level cluster optimization. Despite tightening international restrictions on high-end semiconductors, domestic AI chipmakers like Cambricon are accelerating their adaptation and deployment, finding new opportunities within this mandated expansion of the national computing fabric.
Market data underscores this aggressive infrastructure build-out. Capital expenditure among 63 leading A-share companies in the computing power sector is projected to reach a record 82.3 billion RMB (approximately $11.3 billion) by 2025, a nearly threefold increase from 2020 levels. Major players such as Foxconn Industrial Internet and Runze Technology are leading the charge, with massive investments in cloud servers and hyper-scale data centers. This surge in spending reflects a broad consensus among domestic firms that AI infrastructure is the critical foundation for the next economic cycle.