Fast-evolving artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to play a pivotal role in industrial upgrades, helping China build new growth drivers and injecting strong momentum into high-quality economic growth, experts and company executives said. The technology’s application across various fields will accelerate in 2026, the first year of the country’s 15th Five Year Plan (2026-30) period, they predicted. AI serves as an essential tool in nurturing new quality productive forces and is spearheading a new round of scientific and technological revolution, they said. The country’s vast market, technological prowess and thriving innovation ecosystem underpin its capacity to move cutting-edge technology from research labs into the industrial arena. China is at the forefront of the development and application of AI technology, while the multimodal large language models (LLMs) – which possess the ability to process and generate content across multiple modalities, including text, images, audio and video – will lead the further development of the AI industry, they added.
AI is forecast to contribute USD19.9 trillion to the global economy through 2030, and drive 3.5% of global GDP in 2030, according to a report by market research company International Data Corp (IDC). By automating routine tasks and unlocking new efficiencies, AI will have profound economic consequences reshaping industries, creating new markets and altering the competitive landscape, the report noted.
In January, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek sent shock waves through the tech industry with its cost-effective and open-source LLM. Its performance is on par with leading models from U.S. tech company OpenAI, but at only a fraction of the cost and computing power of its rival. This has been achieved amid tightened export controls on AI chips from the United States. Data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology showed that the nation has maintained its position as a global leader in AI innovation and released 1,509 AI models to date, ranking first among the 3,755 models launched globally. China holds the largest number of AI-related patents, accounting for 60% of the total, according to a Chinese Academy of Cyberspace Studies. Leading Chinese tech heavyweights – including Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance – have stepped up efforts to roll out their own AI-powered LLMs to bolster technological advancements and commercial application of AI technology in a wide range of sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, and finance. In September, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba, unveiled its most powerful AI model, Qwen3-Max, which boasts over 1 trillion parameters, and demonstrates strength in code generation and autonomous agent capabilities. Autonomous agent functionality means an AI system can make independent decisions and finish tasks independently with minimal human intervention. This reinforces Alibaba’s ambition to compete directly with leading Western counterparts, while accelerating innovation in China’s sprawling AI ecosystem, market observers said. Wu Yongming, Alibaba Group CEO, said the company will further increase its CNY380 billion investment in AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years. Wu said the speed of the AI industry’s development and the demand for infrastructure had far outpaced expectations. “In the future, large AI models will be deeply integrated into a wide range of devices, functioning like operating systems – equipped with persistent memory, seamless cloud-edge coordination and the ability to continuously evolve,” Wu said. “We remain committed to open-sourcing Qwen and shaping it into the ‘operating system of the AI era’, empowering developers around the world to build transformative AI applications.”
Since the launch of the first generation of Qwen in 2023, Alibaba has open-sourced over 300 AI models built on its two foundation models. With over 600 million downloads and 170,000 derivative models, Alibaba’s AI models are among the most widely adopted open-source AI series globally. In November, Baidu released its latest LLM Ernie 5.0 model, which is capable of multimodal understanding and generation capacities, and can support input and output of text, images, audio and video. Robin Li, Chairman and CEO of Baidu, said LLM technology is evolving rapidly with the ability to self-learn, iterate and innovate. He is bullish on the prospects of AI-powered digital humans, which can be used in fields such as e-commerce, education, healthcare, customer service and sales.
In August the Chinese government issued a guideline on the deep implementation of the “AI Plus” initiative. The country will promote the use of AI in science and technology, industrial development, consumption, people’s well-being, governance capability and global cooperation, the guideline said. By 2027, China will make achievements in the extensive and deeper integration of AI in six key sectors, with the penetration rate of new-generation intelligent terminals and AI agents surpassing 70%. This figure will exceed 90% by 2030. Weng Xi, Professor at the Guanghua School of Management, said the “AI Plus” initiative is vital for shifting growth drivers from old to new ones, as AI has become a new engine bolstering China’s industrial upgrading, the China Daily reports.
