The 2025 China International Big Data Industry Expo became a platform for global enterprises to showcase their latest developments, share experiences and exchange expertise in AI, as well as being a zone for international supply-demand partnerships. The three-day expo, which ended on August 30 in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province, featured a diverse range of exchanges and activities, and attracted more than 16,000 guests as well as 375 enterprises. Lars Nagel, CEO of the Germany- based International Data Spaces Association, has increased the frequency of his visits to China over the past two years. He views China as one of the front-runners in data space strategies, and one of the world’s leading countries in pursuing the data economy, Nagel told Xinhua News Agency. Nagel said he noticed that over the past year, clear rules and policies on data sharing have been in place in China, which has allowed enterprises to understand what they can do in terms of cross-border data sharing. The Association is currently running data space pilot projects between China and Germany, and they are working “pretty well”, he said.
“China is a big market with a lot of global, powerful players. And what is even more remarkable is that the Chinese data strategy is really a comprehensive one. It’s like a lighthouse in global data strategies to embrace data as a production factor and make use of data for society and for business at the same time,” he said. Nagel’s association has a network of more than 180 companies from all over the world. He looks forward to working with the province closely, and to figuring out how to connect data and generate value out of it. As the country’s first national comprehensive big data pilot zone, Guizhou now has 49 data centers in operation or under construction, working for enterprises including Apple, Huawei and Tencent, as well as scientific research projects like the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, which is also known as the “China Sky Eye”. According to the Development Report on Digital Guizhou (2024), which was released earlier this month, the scale of the province’s digital industry topped CNY250 billion last year, growing 18.3% year-on-year, and the number of people employed in the sector stood at 163,000. Guizhou’s digital economy is taking the lead nationwide and has ranked among the top players across the country for nine consecutive years.
Guizhou has a favorable cool climate all year round, providing naturally air-conditioned rooms for busy heat-emitting servers. The province is also situated away from major earthquake zones, making it safe for data reservoirs. Liu Liehong, Director of the National Data Administration (NDA), said at the Expo’s opening ceremony that the construction and operating costs of data centers in western China are approximately 50% to 70% of those in eastern China.
Sven Loeffler, Director of data spaces and products at T-Systems International said that China has taken data spaces and big data seriously over the past three to four years, with a five-year plan to implement its data strategies. He said that he had been impressed by how many data initiatives were running in different provinces of China, and that the country is taking the sector seriously by releasing specific use cases, motivating and enabling industry players and regions to gain real business benefits out of these initiatives, the China Daily reports.
Meanwhile, at the World Smart Industry Expo 2025, Agile Robots presented a healthcare robot named 'Dabai' capable of providing professional massages thanks to its tactile sensors and artificial intelligence algorithms. The robot can identify individual meridians and acupoints. The four-day Expo brought together more than 600 domestic and international businesses, showcasing over 3,000 innovations in the smart technology industry, including floor-cleaning machines and electronic pets. China's output of service robots exceeded 10.5 million units in 2024, marking a year-on-year increase of 34.3%. According to a Morgan Stanley report, China’s robotics market is projected to grow from USD47 billion in 2024 to USD108 billion by 2028, with service robots achieving a compound annual growth rate of 25%.
In Shenyang, Liaoning province, robots also impressed the audience at the 2025 Global Industrial Internet Conference.
