Introduction

This year marks the beginning of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, with a new blueprint already established. Keywords like “small crayfish,” “intelligent entities,” and “Token” have entered the public eye, reflecting the continuous development of artificial intelligence (AI) in various sectors. The plan aims to advance the construction of a digital China and enhance the level of intelligent development, with the government report in 2026 emphasizing the creation of a new intelligent economy.

Transformation in Small Enterprises

With just two months until the 2026 World Cup, related products are in high demand in Yiwu, Zhejiang. Factories in the region are operating at full capacity. In a knitting enterprise in Jinhua, Zhejiang, scarves related to the World Cup are being produced. Despite having only thirty employees, the company traditionally recorded daily production using handwritten work orders. This year, the owner decided to break a 22-year tradition by integrating everyone’s work into a new system.

Here, the production organization of traditional small enterprises is quietly changing. By scanning a QR code, employees can access order quantities, production processes, and track the status of goods. Urgent and scattered orders, previously avoided, can now be managed with data-driven decision-making.

AI in Large-Scale Projects

Last month, China’s second domestically produced cruise ship, the “Aida Huacheng,” was launched from the Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipyard. This project involves thousands of systems and over 25 million components, where the application of AI technology has significantly improved speed and quality. Each production process is a complex system, and various systems have been establishing their own AI models. The challenge is to unify these dispersed models into a more efficient collective “brain.”

Exploring Intelligent Economy

In this opening year, various regions are exploring how to harness the trends of digitalization, networking, and intelligence to empower industries with AI and create a new intelligent economy. In Shanghai, a practical initiative for deep integration of AI and industry began a few years ago.

Tang Wenkang, Deputy Secretary of the Shanghai Economic and Information Technology Work Committee: We must fully implement the AI+ action to lead industrial paradigm shifts and accelerate the creation of a new intelligent economy. The key lies in fostering an innovative ecosystem and supplying new quality elements.

What kind of ecosystem is needed to build this new intelligent economy? What elements are required? These are questions that AI expert Zhou Bowen has been pondering.

Zhou Bowen, Director and Chief Scientist of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: We are at a historical intersection where AI technology has matured enough to truly transform industries, yet real change has not fully occurred. Infrastructure must shift from merely sufficient to AI-ready, with computing power, data, and models needing to work in harmony.

Key Elements for Intelligent Economy

Zhou Bowen introduced the first key element for creating a new intelligent economy: open-source general models.

Zhou Bowen: The quality of an AI model is not measured by its scores or correct answers, but by its ability to help scientists discover new scientific laws and assist engineers in solving real industrial problems.

In recent years, a number of general open-source models have emerged in China, with 150 models in Shanghai alone having been registered, providing significant convenience for AI development and giving rise to a new economic form known as OPC (One Person + One Computer + AI Tools).

The Rise of One-Person Companies

When the reporter met Wang Wei, she was busy using AI software to adjust character designs. Two years ago, she was the creative director of an advertising company, collaborating with production firms. Now, she has chosen to establish a “one-person company,” capable of independently completing the entire process of advertising short films.

Wang Wei’s company is located in a startup community for one-person companies in Xuhui District, Shanghai, where many policies are tailored for AI+ entrepreneurs.

Lin Le, Deputy Director of the Xuhui District Science and Technology Committee: We provide model vouchers, computing power vouchers, and corpus vouchers to support OPC enterprises. Additionally, we have established the “Early Fund” to finance outstanding OPC projects with up to 1 million yuan. We have already invested in nearly 100 projects.

In this opening year, Xuhui District alone plans to establish five such OPC communities, providing 2,500 workstations and attracting numerous one-person companies.

Demand for Computing Power

Li Miaoyi, a one-person company entrepreneur: Yesterday, the park surveyed us to find out what we needed. Our innate demand for computing power is strong because it allows us to compute more.

The demand from enterprises is the second key element in building a new intelligent economy: sufficient computing power. Shanghai has established a computing scale of over 140,000 P, but some large models may require multiple computing centers during training. Zhou Bowen and his colleagues are researching how to ensure these centers can collaboratively and stably provide data services.

Zhou Bowen: Our lab is studying DeepLink technology, which can integrate discrete computing power from different locations for unified training while also managing various computing needs across eight major hubs in the future.

New Infrastructure Development

To better meet the demands for computing power in the intelligent economy era, a series of new infrastructures are being rapidly constructed. In the Jiangbei New District of Wuhu, Anhui, there is a building resembling a Rubik’s Cube, known as the “Silicon Cube,” which serves as a computing center. Each highlight represents a domestically produced server performing high-speed calculations. Wuhu is one of the ten data center clusters in the “East Data, West Computing” project, and with the Silicon Cube, seven computing centers have been established, making computing power a new engine for the city’s development.

Just months before the reporter’s visit, this center connected to space-based computing power. Since the establishment of the Wuhu cluster in 2022, many enterprises have been attracted to build data centers. However, the challenge remains: how to promote local development after these centers are built? Wuhu City established a big data construction investment and operation company to create a computing power scheduling platform, organizing industries related to computing power.

Data Circulation as a Key Element

With a public platform for computing power services, data processing has become the first industrial cluster centered around computing power. Above the big data company’s office, an AI incubation base named “Computing Cube” has attracted over 20 companies related to algorithms and data.

During the reporter’s visit, a seminar on public data authorization in the healthcare sector was taking place, with nearly full attendance. Through the secure technology platform established by Wuhu’s big data company, some public healthcare data is being considered for authorized development, attracting enterprises and experts from healthcare, data operations, and model development.

In this seminar, the reporter sensed the third key element driving the development of a new intelligent economy: the circulation of data.

Traditional Industries Transforming

Wuhu is a city traditionally focused on manufacturing, with industries like automotive, small appliances, and shipbuilding converging. As data and computing power continue to accumulate, the transformation of traditional manufacturing has accelerated. In a robotics company, several different robots are launched each year.

Initially, this robotics company operated as a project department for an automotive enterprise. In 2025, it established an independent company, continuously increasing the variety and quantity of its products.

In this agricultural field, every sensor and every piece of data collected during flights, which once only served annual production, is now becoming a crucial foundation for agricultural modeling.

Importance of Security Governance

Whether in Shanghai or Wuhu, the applications of large models, the scheduling of computing power, or the circulation of data, the reporter noted that “security governance” is the fourth key element in promoting the development of a new intelligent economy. The circulation of public data requires independent, encrypted platforms, and the use of AI must be strengthened through regulation. National standards for AI security have already begun to be established.

In this opening year, the exploration of the new intelligent economy is taking place in more regions.