China's AI Industry Landscape and Future Prospects Analysis
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The AI industry covers a relatively wide range of sectors, including foundational, technological, and application layers, encompassing various technologies and application scenarios. Currently, China's AI industry landscape is still maturing, with significant development potential across upstream, midstream, and downstream segments.
At present, the AI industry has a clear industrial chain, which can be divided into foundational, technological, and application layers. The foundational layer supports the in-depth development of AI through data or computing power, such as sensors, chips, and cloud computing, primarily involving data collection and processing. Since the introduction of the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan on July 8, 2017, with the active response from industry, academia, and government, the AI technology industry has entered a phase of rapid development. As the engine of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the growth of the AI technology industry will become a key driver for national and regional economic transformation and upgrading. With breakthroughs in scientific foundations and implementation platforms, emerging technologies such as brain-inspired computing, deep learning, and reinforcement learning signal the growth of intrinsic momentum, marking a new stage in AI development.
In recent years, China's intellectual property creation has steadily advanced, with domestic enterprises further solidifying their role as innovation leaders. International confidence in China's intellectual property protection has continued to strengthen, providing a favorable environment for AI technology development. Under the impact of the pandemic in 2020, China's core AI industry expanded significantly, with an industrial scale exceeding 100 billion yuan. The unique advantages of China's AI development lie in the organic integration of vast industry application scenarios, accumulated R&D capabilities, massive data resources, and an open macroeconomic environment. Leveraging the broad prospects of the application market, technological innovation is being driven, creating a dual impetus from both technology and market. According to Zhongyan Puhua's estimates, the core AI industry scale will exceed 450 billion yuan by 2025 and is expected to surpass one trillion yuan by 2030.
With the support of national policies and the development of related foundational technologies such as 5G, China's AI industry has entered a phase of explosive growth, driven by collective efforts from all sectors, with immense market potential. The global AI market has grown from approximately $60 billion in 2016 to nearly $300 billion in 2021, with companies like Amazon, ByteDance, SenseTime, and Tesla rapidly expanding, supported by technologies such as recommendation systems, computer vision, and natural language processing. Reports indicate that in 2020, China's AI industry scale reached 303.1 billion yuan, a 15% year-on-year increase, slightly higher than the global growth rate. As of now, China's core AI industry scale exceeds 400 billion yuan, with nearly 4,000 enterprises. The AI industry in China continues to expand, with significantly accelerated development speed, and is expected to become the world's largest AI market in the future. In the post-pandemic era, the AI industry is poised for rapid growth during the 14th Five-Year Plan period.
Industry Landscape
In recent years, China has introduced multiple policies on the new generation of AI, forming a development pattern led by key regions with diverse growth across the country. China's AI industry is moving toward large-scale implementation. The eastern region of China leads in AI development, with three major industrial clusters centered around Beijing, the Yangtze River Delta, and Guangdong. Currently, China's new-generation AI open innovation platforms are supported by companies such as Baidu, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, iFlytek, and SenseTime, focusing on autonomous driving, city brains, medical imaging, intelligent voice, and intelligent vision. Over the past few years, due to strategic prioritization and the efforts of domestic enterprises, China has become a globally recognized leader in AI. However, it is crucial to recognize that global competition in AI is intensifying, and the competitive landscape is constantly evolving, necessitating a sense of urgency.
Future Prospects
AI is a critical infrastructure for the digital economy in the new era, with the capability to integrate across industries. An increasing number of sectors are undergoing various levels of intelligent transformation. The new AI era will be a pan-intelligent era, extending far beyond traditional internet and tech industries, bringing leaps in productivity and connectivity across society. Supported by industrial policies and gradually健全的市场立法, China's AI market is expected to grow rapidly, exceeding 300 billion yuan by 2025. As the world's largest AI application market, China has seen rapid AI technology adoption across multiple industries and scenarios. The rapid development of AI in China is stimulating economic growth across sectors, with immense potential in the application market.