China will make manufacturing the main battlefield and application-driven integration the central thread as it works to empower a new type of industrialization with high-level artificial intelligence, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
The ministry has organized nearly 30 "deep dive" events on AI empowering a new type of industrialization, helping more than 5,000 enterprises connect on supply and demand. It has supported the creation of 18 national pilot zones for AI innovation and application, including Beijing and Jinan-Qingdao, pushed industry players to develop nearly 200 key AI technical standards, and set up a 60 billion yuan national AI industry investment fund.
Manufacturing is the main battlefield for AI deployment, and China's complete industrial system is a major advantage in developing AI, Vice Minister Yu Xiaohui said. He called for focusing on key sectors such as raw materials, equipment manufacturing, consumer goods, and electronic information to accelerate the distillation and promotion of a batch of high-value scenarios and typical applications, and to produce a number of distinctive intelligent agents.
Yu said the ministry will promote the development and application of urgently needed AI standards, speed up the release of the 2026 edition of the National Guidelines for Building a Comprehensive Standardization System for the AI Industry, lay out and build computing interconnection nodes, and improve the efficiency and service level of public computing power. The national AI fund will play a guiding role to drive more social capital investment.
Currently, China's core AI industry has exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan in scale, with more than 6,600 AI companies and intelligent computing power reaching 259.2 billion billion floating-point operations per second (EFLOPS).
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on the 15th officially released the "High-Value Scenarios for AI Empowering a New Type of Industrialization," providing a reference "industry navigation map" for AI-driven industrialization.
The high-value scenarios, completed by multiple research institutions and enterprises, cover more than 1,000 scenarios across 20 sub-sectors including petrochemicals, steel, automobiles, and consumer electronics. These "AI plus" applications all come from frontline manufacturing practice.
Experts noted that AI is facing challenges in industrial deployment, including some companies blindly following trends, duplicated construction, and difficulty in transferring and reusing successful experience.
High-value scenarios must fit enterprises' actual business needs, deliver benefits that can be replicated at scale, and match current technical capabilities, said Wei Liang, vice president of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. They are classified into three categories by maturity: promotion-level scenarios that have landed stably and can be replicated externally, validation-level scenarios that have completed pilot tests but still need broader application, and research-level scenarios still in the technical breakthrough stage.
Wei said statistics show that nearly half of "AI plus" application scenarios remain in the pilot stage and have not achieved scaled promotion. Sorting high-value scenarios by industry, application link, and technical maturity will provide a unified reference for all industries, reduce duplicated investment, and lower enterprise costs.
At present, AI in China has basically run through the entire chain, including R&D and design, production and manufacturing, and quality inspection and operations.
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