Amid the sweeping wave of artificial intelligence, the One-Person Company (OPC) has emerged as a new focal point in urban industrial competition. The question of how to cultivate fertile ground for OPC growth has become a fresh test of a city's competitiveness. In Guangdong province alone, areas such as Guangzhou's Pazhou, Zhuhai's Xiangzhou District and High-tech Zone, and Dongguan's Songshan Lake have actively explored talent development, platform construction, and financial support to build AI OPC ecosystems.
A group of entrepreneurs has put down roots in Zhuhai. Despite diverse backgrounds and different business focuses, they are all drawn by the city's "lightweight" entrepreneurial environment. Under the OPC model, they have rapidly transformed creative ideas into commercial realities.
Many ambitious super-individual entrepreneurs often stumble at the very first step: unaffordable office space, prohibitive computing power costs, and a lack of practical application scenarios can cause promising ideas to never materialize. Within less than a month, Zhuhai established two OPC communities and released corresponding lists of available application scenarios.
On March 15, the Zhuhai Xiangzhou Chuanggang OPC Community officially launched, becoming one of the city's first operational bases for nurturing "super individuals." It offers a series of substantial support measures, including rents starting from just 1 yuan, fully-furnished offices, and nearly 2,000 free talent apartments. The park is equipped with government service kiosks and features a "one-center, one-station, three-platforms" service system, enabling businesses to complete nearly 200 administrative procedures—from company registration to tax filing—without leaving the premises, creating a "green channel" for entrepreneurs to focus on technology development and market expansion.
On April 8, the western Pearl River Delta Science City's first comprehensive AI OPC empowerment platform—the Zhuhai "AI+" OPC Maker Community—was officially inaugurated. Centered around a "one-platform, three-centers" framework, it aims to build a unique support system combining investment empowerment, real-world application, and ecological synergy through affordable computing power, scenario integration, and full-chain resource coordination. The platform provides end-to-end support for AI startups, from technical incubation to commercial deployment.
It innovatively introduced a "bulk computing power purchase + subsidy + whitelist" mechanism, leveraging centralized procurement to lower computing costs and offering入驻 projects between 10,000 and 20,000 yuan in free computing power support. A mixed computing infrastructure incorporating both domestic chips and NVIDIA GPUs has been established, supporting bare metal, single-card, and API modes to meet diverse needs. Additionally, the initial phase includes 11,000 square meters of flexible office space, complemented by rent reductions and one-stop services, significantly lowering startup costs and allowing entrepreneurs to "start working immediately upon arrival."
Opening up real-world application scenarios is another major advantage Zhuhai offers OPC entrepreneurs. Unlike some cities that provide policies but no actual projects, Zhuhai proactively releases genuine opportunities, enabling entrepreneurs to "land and get to work." On March 27, Meihua Subdistrict in Xiangzhou District published an opportunity list focused on five areas: future communities, health services, smart sanitation, intelligent parking, and municipal management. Covering four sub-sectors, the list unveiled 32 real-world scenario demands with a total value of 61.1 million yuan, all representing actual situations in the district requiring digital and intelligent upgrades.
Chen Zhong, founding dean of the BNU-HKBU United International College's Bo Ya AI Academy, noted that while various regions have introduced policies with attractive conditions, beyond these hardware benefits, it is essential to build a soft environment. This includes gathering intellectual resources, wisdom, and talents from fields such as education, technology, finance, and more within alliances and communities to form a healthy developmental ecosystem. Simultaneously, safety concerns must be avoided. As technology evolves, it involves multifaceted issues like ethics and law. The new challenges brought by large models as novel computational tools and intelligent knowledge processing methods also require significant attention.
Parkour world champion and BNU-HKBU United International College student Zhang Yunpeng is one of the participants in Zhuhai's OPC entrepreneurial wave. He plans to establish an OPC company in the Zhuhai "AI+" OPC Maker Community focusing on three core areas: sports training, event operations, and film/advertising production. "The main reason for choosing the Zhuhai 'AI+' OPC Maker Community is that its model aligns perfectly with our OPC approach," Zhang explained. His venture is centered around his personal professional IP, with aspects like teaching, event execution, and content production handled through external collaborations. Zhuhai's environment恰好适配这种轻资产模式.
In Zhang's view, Zhuhai is not merely supporting a company but experimenting with backing a lighter, more flexible entrepreneurial structure. "For cultural and sports startups like ours, this structure is more suitable because we are inherently content-driven and project-driven, not based on a heavy-asset model. So I believe Zhuhai's advantage lies not just in policies, but in its attempt to pave a path 'more suited to young entrepreneurs'."
The integration of AI technology has significantly empowered Zhang's OPC venture. "For us, the greatest value of AI is not replacement, but compressing tasks that previously required a small team down to something one person can handle. This fits the OPC model very well," Zhang said. He gave an example of a current film project where, during the planning stage, tools like ChatGPT or Gemini are used to expand scripts, storyboard structures, generate concept art, and create scene previews based on initial ideas—greatly improving efficiency compared to purely manual methods.
With this confidence, Zhang has a clear roadmap for the future. Over the next one to two years, he plans to refine a "OPC sports culture model" in Zhuhai, developing a parkour training system suitable for modern universities, creating传播力强的 sports content integrated with Zhuhai's urban spaces, and establishing a sustainable city-level parkour event IP, which could later be replicated in other Greater Bay Area cities.
While most freshmen are still adjusting to university life, BNU-HKBU United International College freshman Xu Hecheng has founded a company focused on providing AI-native educational solutions. The core team consists of five university students, each with unique expertise in different fields. Physical space, computing power support, token subsidies, and a complete industrial ecosystem—all these factors enable a student startup team to operate with minimal overhead. "Zhuhai's OPC community also provides connections to local resources, linking us to universities and industry players," Xu noted.
"AI is developing extremely fast. We have a sense that if we don't start a business now, the opportunity might be gone later," Xu shared. In the highly competitive AI landscape, Xu and his team have avoided blindly following trends and instead found their niche. His company has taken a path distinctly different from traditional edtech firms. Rather than building a broad, mass-market product from the outset, Xu chose a specific and precise segment. On the B2B side, the focus is on constructing AI-native curricula and facilitating the digital-intelligent transformation of courses for schools. On the B2C side, they develop AI learning assistants tailored for students in Sino-foreign cooperative programs, based on courseware scenarios.
"It's not what you'd call 'AI-plus,' but rather 'AI-native'—the product cannot exist without AI," Xu emphasized. This isn't about adding AI features as an enhancement to existing software; it's a product built from the ground up for AI.
The small seed has already begun to take root. Xu mentioned that the company has already expanded its B2B client base to universities in Zhuhai and Guangzhou. The fixed annual cost for the company's product is under 1,000 yuan, and with all operational expenses included, the total annual cost is controlled within 5,000 yuan. "This means we are better positioned to weather economic cycles and withstand uncertainties."
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