The artificial intelligence industry in Shanghai has reported significant growth in the past few years and become a new engine for the city's economy.

By the end of the first quarter, the total industrial value of Shanghai-based AI companies with a minimum annual sales revenue of 20 million yuan ($2.8 million) has exceeded 118 billion yuan, up 29 percent year-on-year.

The profit generated by these companies surged 65 percent yearly, according to Zhang Ying, deputy secretary-general of the Shanghai municipal government and director of the Shanghai Commission of Economic and Informatization.

In recent years, China has been striving to advance AI development. According to an action plan released by the National Data Administration in May, China aims to make great strides in building a Digital China by the end of 2025, with the continuous expansion of new quality productive forces and improvements in the quality and efficiency of economic development.

The plan said that the total scale of China's supercomputing power will surpass 300 exaflops by then. Known as EFLOPS, this is a unit of the speed of computer systems and is equal to 1 quintillion floating-point operations (or calculations) per second. Steady progress will also be made in building a unified data elements market.

Consolidating foundation

Shanghai, which has long supported AI industry development in China, is set to achieve significant progress in consolidating its AI development foundation and construct an intelligent computing resource coordination and scheduling service platform.

The city's smart computing supply capacity will exceed 100 EFLOPS by the end of 2025, according to Zhang.

Shanghai launched the country's first corpus operation platform in 2024 to explore crowd sourcing, crowd innovation and crowd funding.

In AI, a corpus refers to a large and structured collection of texts used for training machine learning models. So far, the platform has accumulated more than 1,800 terabytes of corpus data.

The city also released guidelines for corpus database construction, including five pioneering standards. Efforts have also been made by companies and research institutes to accelerate the commercialization of new developments.

Demonstration zones

At the end of 2024, Shanghai revealed a plan to boost the development of the AI industry. The city has various AI demonstration bases across sectors including manufacturing, finance, healthcare and education. In total, 82 large models have been registered with leading regulatory bodies.

Shanghai has achieved breakthroughs by leveraging AI technology to support scientific advancements. For instance, SAIS-Fudan's Fuxi model has greatly improved the accuracy of weather forecasting. Additionally, research teams from Shanghai Jiao Tong University have introduced a protein sequence dataset known as the Venus-Protein Outsize Database.

Humanoid intelligence robots have also been used to support manufacturing and logistics.

Gathering hubs

In addition, Shanghai has been dedicated to constructing AI industry gathering hubs. The SMC Shanghai Foundation Model Innovation Center in Xuhui district and the Model Magic Community in Pudong New Area are home to more than 700 AI businesses. These two prominent AI hubs offer life-cycle finance support to businesses.

Talent is key

In recent years, Shanghai has been promoting the establishment of AI research institutes in 14 universities and the introduction of AI-related majors in 19 universities.

This initiative aims to accelerate the construction of an AI talent pool, optimize talent policies, improve the professional talent evaluation system, speed up the gathering of high-end talents, and establish a multilevel and systematic AI talent support system.

The city is home to nearly 300,000 AI professionals, accounting for some one-third of the national total.

By building a comprehensive open-source ecosystem, initiatives such as Alibaba's Model Scope and OpenAtom Foundation to develop online open-source communities have led to the release of 420 billion tokens of text and 1 TB of video and image data, and lowered the threshold for AI entrepreneurship.

Long-term commitment

In pursuit of balancing development and security, Shanghai has been dedicated to constructing a robust governance system for AI and calling for global cooperation on relevant issues. The city is steadfast in its commitment to implementing the Shanghai Declaration on Global AI Governance, which was revealed during the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference.

Looking ahead, Shanghai will continue to promote the development of the AI industry and is set to be a highland in China's AI sector.