On April 22, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology held a press conference on the first-quarter economic performance of the city's industrial and information software sectors, highlighting a strong start to 2026. It was reported that Beijing's digital economy value-added grew by 9.3% year-on-year in the first quarter, with core digital industries expanding by 12%, solidifying the digital economy's role as a key driver of high-quality development.
Zhang Jinrui, head of the Digital Industry Department at the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology, outlined several achievements in building Beijing into a global benchmark for the digital economy. First, the artificial intelligence sector achieved breakthroughs. Zhipu AI was listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming the world's first publicly traded company focused on general artificial intelligence (AGI) foundation models. ByteDance released its next-generation video generation model, Seedance 2.0, which ranked first in multiple international multimodal video generation evaluations. The Doubao app surpassed 8.87 billion cumulative downloads, maintaining its leading position domestically. Moonshot AI open-sourced its Kimi K2.5 and K2.6 models, which repeatedly topped global open-source model rankings due to their native multimodal and multi-agent collaboration capabilities. To date, 225 large AI models have been registered with the Cyberspace Administration of China in Beijing, accounting for approximately 30% of the national total and ranking first in the country.
Second, high-quality computing power supply saw new progress. Beijing added 10,000 petaflops of computing capacity in the first quarter, bringing the city's total computing scale to 70,000 petaflops. The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei "Galaxy Computing Corridor" project accelerated, establishing a cross-regional, multi-level computing collaboration system. In the first quarter, over 900,000 petaflops of high-quality computing resources from the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and western China were utilized. Forty existing data centers in the city began green and low-carbon upgrades.
Third, digital empowerment of enterprise development and social governance reached new heights. The 3.0 version of the comprehensive reform plan for facilitating cross-border data flow was officially released, aiming to shift data cross-border practices from compliance-driven to value-driven. The "Beijing Comprehensive Deepening of 'One-Network Service' to Promote Smart Government Development Action Plan (2026–2027)" was issued to continuously optimize smart government service scenarios and enhance digital governance and public service efficiency.
Zhang Jinrui stated that next steps will focus on fully implementing the "2026 Key Tasks for Building Beijing into a Global Digital Economy Benchmark City." Priority areas include advancing digital technology in key fields such as large AI models, 6G, quantum information, and embodied intelligence; expanding the AI industry scale and developing common underlying frameworks for intelligent agents; accelerating the establishment of national AI application pilot bases and promoting AI-generated content in short videos and film production; enhancing digital infrastructure, including adding over 70,000 petaflops of intelligent computing capacity and expanding the Galaxy Computing Corridor; and improving digital services through smarter, replicable government applications.
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