In the China AI Development Report for 2020 and the AI Open Index, 10 cities were listed among the world’s top 100 cities by artificial intelligence innovation power. Hefei, capital of Anhui province, ranked fourth among all the Chinese cities listed and third among those on the Chinese mainland. Since 2013, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Anhui Provincial Government have been developing China Speech Valley, a high-tech industrial park, into a major hub for the AI industry. It is located in the Hefei National High-tech Industry Development Zone. More than 1,000 companies are working in the park to grab a slice of the country’s huge AI development market.
Among them, publicly-traded iFlytek reported an operating revenue of more than CNY13 billion last year, with net income of CNY1.36 billion. So far, iFlytek’s open-access platform has served millions of entrepreneurs and third-party developers who use its AI and speech-recognition technologies to conduct business, it said. With the support of iFlytek’s platform, MiMouse, a technology startup in speech-recognition technologies, settled in China Speech Valley six years ago. Its main product is a smart mouse. Other companies headquartered in the zone include Huami Corp, a United States-listed maker of smart wearables. Qi Dongfeng, CEO of China Speech Valley, said the park has made great efforts to help its clients, mostly small and medium-sized enterprises, build up business in the AI field. Among them, 17 have an annual operating revenue of more than CNY1 billion.
In 2017, the Anhui government issued a blueprint to build the valley with a CNY5 billion investment, aiming to foster a world class industrial AI cluster with international competitiveness. The city government introduced measures to simplify administrative procedures. In the Government Service Center of the Hefei High-tech Zone, the time needed to start a company has been reduced to one day or even less, and it only takes three to four days to obtain a business license, compared with at least one month previously. Entrepreneurs can receive help with low-cost office rentals, recruitment of college graduates, support from AI experts, expanding market share and obtaining bank loans. The provincial government provides China Speech Valley with CNY800 million a year to improve its industry chain, help entrepreneurs reduce office rentals and increase investment in research and market expansion. With a population of 9.37 million, Hefei is being built into a “municipality of innovation”, according to the city government’s plan, the China Daily reports.
