Hefei's decades-long transformation from a small county-level capital into a major Yangtze River Delta city with a trillion-yuan economy and a population above ten million has been driven by a determined push across two kinds of "chips" — semiconductors and seeds.
The name "Hefei" carries weighty geographical significance in classical writing, and the city has earned its place through steady, persistent effort rather than luck.
Industrial chips: breakthroughs on tiny silicon wafers
Inside the production workshops of ChangXin Memory Technologies, overhead hoists glide along rails, delivering 12-inch silicon wafers to deposition, lithography, and etching machines. Nanoscale circuits are carved layer by layer onto wafers, with tens of billions of transistors packed onto chips the size of a fingertip.
More than a decade ago, Hefei's home appliance and display production lines ran around the clock, yet over 80% of core chips were sourced overseas. The shortage of chips and displays made industrial upgrading difficult.
"Whatever is missing, we fill the gap," said Yu Zhaobing, deputy director of the Hefei Development and Reform Commission. In 2013, the city became an early mover in planning the integrated circuit industry, setting its course around wafer manufacturing and local demand, targeting four key tracks: display drivers, memory, smart home appliances, and automotive electronics.
At the 2026 World Manufacturing Convention, an integrated smart cockpit on the BOE exhibition stand lit up an ultra-long in-vehicle display spanning the instrument panel and center console, with fine image quality and smooth touch response. The display driver chip powering the screen came from Nexchip. General Manager Cai Guozhi expressed pride: "Our display driver chip foundry market share ranks first globally, with nearly 60% of capacity supplying local companies like BOE, greatly reducing supply chain turnaround costs. Wafers off the line can reach panel production lines immediately."
These "screens and chips" bearing Hefei's imprint will be assembled at the final assembly workshop of the Zunjie Super Factory and fitted into in-vehicle control systems. Not far away, high-speed automotive interface chips developed by Lontium Semiconductor are also embedded into the smart cockpit systems of NIO vehicles. From wafers to panels to finished vehicles, this is the most vivid illustration of Hefei's "chip-screen-auto integration" — upstream manufacturing and downstream applications meeting halfway, with industry chains interlocking and thriving together.
Tracing further upstream along the supply chain, the industrial spark has grown into a prairie fire: in the clean rooms of Hefei Guangyan Photomask, high-precision lithography masks undergo optical imaging inspection before being sealed and sent to wafer fabrication plants; wafers from ChangXin Memory Technologies are cut, mounted, bonded, and molded at Pietech Technology to become finished memory chips; metrology equipment from Epic Semiconductor has already been operating in volume at leading wafer fabs.
With leading enterprises clustering and supporting firms forming groups, "companies settling in Hefei find core customers right at their doorstep, lowering R&D trial-and-error costs and speeding up iteration," said Wang Fan, founder of Hefei Yuxing Semiconductor, who brought his team from Shanghai to Hefei five years ago. He noted that when upstream and downstream are in one place, the path to innovation encounters fewer detours.
After more than a decade of relentless cultivation, silicon photonics has converged into a brilliant "river of chips." According to statistics, the city's integrated circuit output value grew from 18 billion yuan in 2016 to 151.43 billion yuan in 2025, with over 500 enterprises linked together, forming an industrial cluster covering design, manufacturing, packaging and testing, equipment, and materials — also selected as one of the first national strategic emerging industry clusters.
A tiny chip lays the foundation for all industries. What is carved onto a small wafer is not just nanoscale circuits, but the trajectory of a city's industrial breakthrough from filling gaps to building an ecosystem.
Agricultural chips: quality seeds secure granaries
In Huagang Town, Feixi County, over 1,000 mu of high-standard experimental fields are divided into eight neat exhibition zones, like a large "arena" where more than 350 quality rice varieties compete. This is the Hefei grain and oil crop innovation platform of the Yazhou Bay National Laboratory, where the Rice Research Institute of the Anhui Academy of Agricultural Sciences conducts research. Teachers and students count rice panicles per hill in the field, taking notes as they go.
Yang Pu, deputy director of the institute, said this is a full-chain development platform of "research plus pilot testing plus promotion," which not only meets diverse breeding selection needs but also allows on-site technology integration trials and demonstrations, making good seeds obvious in field comparisons.
Research revolves around industry. Li Chao, director of the Feixi County Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau, said seeds are the "chips" of agriculture. By introducing high-level science and innovation platforms, Feixi selects a batch of quality rice varieties suited to local climate and planting needs, pushing the rice industry from "yield increase" toward "quality improvement."
Breeding good seeds and building a seed industry capital did not happen overnight. In the 1980s, reform winds swept across the Jianghuai region, and the Hefei Seed Management Station was restructured into a seed company — the predecessor of SDIC Fengle Seed. More than a dozen veteran breeders rooted themselves in the fields, and within a few years Hefei watermelon seeds were selling across the country. A single seed gave rise to the domestic seed industry's "first stock" and ignited the initial spark for seed industry industrialization.
Over time, the industry has grown into a forest. Today Hefei has gathered 281 seed enterprises, including two A-share listed companies and seven national seed industry array enterprises. In 2025, seed industry sales revenue reached 13.5 billion yuan, ranking among the top in the country.
Wang Shizhao's family farm in Lujiang County has 2,800 mu of rice fields. This year, he trial-planted a new quality rice variety jointly bred by Winall Hi-tech Seed and the Anhui Academy of Agricultural Sciences, with high-yield plots approaching 2,000 jin per mu, bringing the vision of "ton-grain fields" closer to reality.
On the fertile fields, good seeds heading and filling depend on Hefei incorporating modern seed industry into the city's broader science and innovation strategy with sustained nurturing. Enterprises are the main body of seed industry innovation, promoting enterprise-research collaboration, cultivating superior varieties, and adapting to market demand. Winall Hi-tech Seed led the formation of a "6+1" national rice commercial molecular breeding technology innovation alliance, accelerating breeding through genomics and other technologies; Fengda Seed's water-saving and drought-resistant rice achieves stable yields in dry seasons through germplasm innovation; Anhui Guohao uses molecular marker selection to breed oilseed varieties suited to the Yangtze River basin.
Focusing on building a seed industry innovation source, the city is striving on frontier tracks such as biological breeding and intelligent design breeding. The intelligent breeding robot "Xiaohai" compresses traditional breeding cycles from 8-10 years to 2-3 years; AI climate chambers can conduct wheat stress tests, with germplasm mutation, identification, and screening completed in one flow; the soybean vertical large model "Fengshu" 2.0 integrates multimodal data to empower soybean assisted breeding. Currently, the city has built 41 seed industry R&D platforms, forming a three-dimensional seed industry innovation matrix.
Good seeds are bred in the Jianghuai countryside and also travel along the Silk Road to the world. In the greenhouse of the Jianghuai Horticulture breeding base in Changfeng County, melons and fruits fill the air with sweetness. The freshly picked "Xiangfei" melon is dense and sweet. As a national seed industry array enterprise, its "Xiangfei" melon seeds rank first in the Pakistani market, and "Xiali" watermelon seeds have topped the Indian market for four consecutive years; "Jiabei No. 1" Beibei pumpkin broke foreign seed monopolies and is exported abroad. Today, more than 20 seed enterprises from Hefei have set sail overseas, with good seeds sown across fields in over 40 countries and regions. Among them, hybrid rice seed exports have ranked first nationwide for seven consecutive years.
One seed, ten thousand grains. With science and innovation as its plow and quality seeds as its chip, Hefei spreads a harvest scene of full granaries across vast fields.
Nurturing enterprise: patience and sincerity build fertile ground
The rise of dual "chips" has never been a casual gift of market trends. It is a city's patience in doing things steadily, its craftsmanship in fine cultivation, and its sincerity in welcoming business and keeping investors — the result of an effective market and a proactive government advancing together, hammered out stroke by stroke.
Maintaining patience means braving long-cycle tracks. At the end of the 14th Five-Year Plan period, R&D investment intensity reached 4.11%, steadily ranking among the top cities with a trillion-yuan GDP; three state-owned platforms — Hefei Construction Investment, Hefei Industrial Investment, and Xingtai — have built a "fund forest" with a total scale of nearly 300 billion yuan, with a clear 50% fault tolerance mechanism for seed funds — not demanding short-term returns, not fearing trial and error, giving innovation ample room to grow.
During periods when the industry was watching from the sidelines, the city supported ChangXin Memory Technologies and Nexchip with hundred-billion-level investment in wafer manufacturing, following the logic of "state capital guidance — project landing — equity exit — circular development," allowing BOE project returns to feed new tracks; knowing that the seed industry requires large investment and yields thin profits, it still chose to focus on the fields — during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, the city allocated 287 million yuan to tackle core seed industry technologies and set up a 500-million-yuan seed industry special fund to add confidence to germplasm innovation.
Upholding craftsmanship means nurturing a vibrant science and innovation ecosystem. The long-term competitiveness of an industry ultimately comes down to the competitiveness of its innovation ecosystem: universities and research institutes such as the University of Science and Technology of China solidify the foundation of basic research, while major scientific facilities such as steady-state strong magnetic fields reinforce underlying technological support; the "industry poses questions, science answers" achievement transformation mechanism lands precisely, striving to overcome the "last mile" of domestic production of core chip equipment and enabling breeding achievements to leave the laboratory and enter vast fields.
In the USTC Silicon Valley area, electrical failure analysis equipment developed by Lingguang Infrared has already received orders from ChangXin Memory Technologies. Hou Dazhi, the person in charge, pointed to a prototype in the lab and remarked: "Hefei's 'industry poses questions, science answers' mechanism directly matches our technology with wafer fab needs." Such two-way journeys happen every day. Over five years, about 3,000 new enterprises were established through commercialization of scientific and technological achievements, including more than 100 seed unicorn enterprises valued at over 100 million yuan. Hefei ranked 12th globally in the Nature Supplement "2025 Nature Index — Science Cities."
Upholding sincerity means enriching the fertile ground for enterprise. The ancient Luzhou of grain transport fleets and thriving craftsmen had a tradition of protecting industry and treating businesses well, and today this sincerity permeates every detail of government services. "Start construction upon land acquisition" shortens project landing cycles, "exempt from application, enjoy directly" delivers policy benefits straight to business entities, "visit enterprises and enter villages" responds to enterprise demands in a closed loop, and "no-sense inspections" loosen burdens on operations. Hefei has issued 1,035 measures to optimize the business environment over eight consecutive years, translating into the tangible feeling among enterprises of "no need to run around, someone is in charge."
This sincerity draws "science drifters" from all over. In the past three years, an average of 350,000 university students have come to Hefei for employment and entrepreneurship annually, and the permanent resident population has increased by more than 500,000 cumulatively — original aspirations and enthusiasm have a place to settle and grow.
From farming and weaving to the rise of dual "chips," Hefei's determination toward practicality and innovation has never changed, and its pace toward excellence and higher ground has never stopped. Hefei has "chips," living up to the Jianghuai region.
Comments