Hefei has been officially approved to establish a National Artificial Intelligence Industry Innovation Application Pilot Zone, securing a prestigious national-level designation for its burgeoning AI industry.
This initiative, led by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, aims to promote the deep integration of AI with the real economy. Through policy experimentation and open application scenarios, it seeks to accelerate the validation and large-scale deployment of new technologies and products, cultivate new growth drivers for the economy, and create replicable experience models for the rest of the country.
This approval marks a critical step for Hefei in implementing the national AI development strategy and establishing itself as a hub for industrial innovation. It holds significant strategic importance for cultivating new growth points in emerging industries and empowering new industrialization through AI.
Building a Data Foundation
Hefei has been proactive in constructing its digital infrastructure, having built 34,000 5G base stations and over 3,700 5G-A sites. The city has also established a national-level internet backbone direct connection point and an international internet data dedicated channel, earning recognition as one of the first batch of key cities for 5G application expansion and 5G-A commercial networks. Furthermore, it has built the country's first 10,000-card domestic computing power cluster and the first quantum-supercomputing integration center, with a managed computing power exceeding 25,800 P and expected to surpass 40,000 P by the end of the year. A city-level computing resource pool has been established, connecting 21 national computing service providers and achieving interoperability with national-level infrastructure like the China Supercomputing Internet. The city has accelerated the construction of an intelligent manufacturing system, achieving dynamic full coverage of digital transformation for industrial enterprises above a designated size. It has cultivated 12 national-level industrial internet platforms, ranking 6th in the country, and fostered 8 global "lighthouse factories," ranking 3rd among Chinese cities, along with 227 intelligent factories.
Fostering Industrial Clusters
Hefei now hosts approximately 1,500 AI-related enterprises, with the industry chain's revenue surpassing 100 billion yuan. This has formed a complete industrial chain covering hardware, algorithms, terminals, and applications, maintaining a leading domestic position in areas like intelligent speech, integrated circuits, and quantum technology. The intelligent speech industry has been selected as one of the first national advanced manufacturing clusters, and AI has been recognized as a national strategic emerging industry cluster. The software industry has grown by an average of over 20% annually during the 14th Five-Year Plan period and continues to maintain rapid growth this year. The iFlytek Spark model is the country's first foundational large model trained on entirely domestic computing power. The "ZhiXiang WeiLai" model became the first Chinese generative large model to top a global authoritative AI ranking list. NIO's world model has won the Wuwenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Award first prize.
Empowering Industrial Upgrades
Hefei is focusing on key industries such as new energy vehicles to deeply integrate AI into manufacturing. In the new energy vehicle sector, AI algorithms drive over 80% of vehicle manufacturing scenarios, with intelligent robots fully covering the four major manufacturing processes of stamping, welding, painting, and final assembly. NIO's F2 factory, for instance, uses flexible production to accommodate millions of personalized configurations, achieving an AI detection accuracy rate of 99.7% and efficiency 10 times higher than manual labor. In the high-end equipment sector, Anhui Heli's intelligent automated guided vehicles enable fully unmanned material flow in production workshops, increasing material turnover efficiency by 40% and reducing error rates from 3% to 0.1%. In the smart home appliance sector, multimodal AI quality inspection solutions provide full-dimensional detection of appearance defects, functions, voice response, and abnormal sounds, operating across more than 90 production lines and inspecting over 54 million products.
Driving Real-World Applications
Hefei has established the country's first city-level scenario company, having released over 160 AI application scenarios. In the field of government governance, a national-level "AI + bidding supervision" scenario project is now fully deployed across 16 cities in the province. Other projects, such as the domestic AI large model for digital campus safety and an AI converged media content production and dissemination service, have been selected for the 2025 Anhui Province AI scenario innovation project list. In the public service sector, "AI + education" covers over 60,000 schools and 160 million teachers and students nationwide. Local intelligent terminals in Hefei serve over 440,000 teachers and students, a program selected as a pilot case by the Ministry of Education. In healthcare, "AI + medical" covers over 800 counties nationwide, assisting in 1.13 billion diagnoses. The Anhui Provincial Medical Imaging Cloud Platform has connected to nearly 2,000 medical institutions, becoming the first local platform to successfully connect to the national medical insurance information platform and enable cross-provincial record access.
Looking ahead, Hefei's pilot zone will focus on the principles of "seeking reform, strengthening innovation, promoting application, and guiding experience." It will concentrate on tackling key AI technologies and focusing on key areas such as "AI + new industrialization" and "agent internet," aiming to build Hefei into a competitive AI innovation hub and industrial source.
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