China’s Economic Powerhouses Race To Lead AI Breakthroughs

China’s most powerful economic regions – the Yangtze River Delta and the Greater Bay Area – are racing to meet President Xi Jinping’s call for breakthroughs in core technologies including artificial intelligence, as Beijing maps out priorities for the coming 15th five-year plan during the “two sessions”.

As part of the annual meeting on Friday, provincial and municipal leaders of Zhejiang province outlined an ambitious strategy to become a key area of AI development and cement the province’s innovation role within the Yangtze River Delta, while Shanghai’s mayor also vowed to help make the delta region into a “global technology powerhouse”.

On the same day, officials from the southern province of Guangdong – home to the nine mainland cities that, together with Hong Kong and Macau, make up the Greater Bay Area – vowed to accelerate technological and industrial innovation to reinforce that region’s position as one of China’s most advanced manufacturing bases.

On Thursday, Xi told deputies from Jiangsu province that China’s major provincial economies should take the lead in technological innovation and strengthen their resilience to external shocks over the next five years.

Zhejiang province, part of the megalopolis comprising Shanghai and part of surrounding provinces Jiangsu and Anhui, promised closer integration with other parts of the delta as it sought to “seize the major strategic opportunity” to co-build an international innovation base.

The delta area makes up only 4 per cent of the country’s land area but accounts for about a quarter of its gross domestic product (GDP).

Gao Yingzhong, director of Zhejiang’s provincial department of science and technology, said on Friday that the province aimed to secure more national-level strategic technology platforms and projects this year. The province would “accelerate the development of artificial intelligence innovation, seize the strategic opportunities for AI development, and create a new form of smart economy”, he said.

At the centre of Zhejiang’s tech aspirations was the capital, Hangzhou. Mayor Yao Gaoyuan said at the meeting that the city’s digital economy reached 29.5 per cent of its GDP in 2025, surpassing the national average of 10.5 per cent.

He also highlighted advancements by the city’s “Six Little Dragons” – a group of high-growth tech firms that includes AI model developer DeepSeek, robotics firms Unitree and Deep Robotics, and video game studio GameScience.

Notably, most of the “Six Little Dragons” had recorded triple-digit growth in revenue or output value last year, Yao said, adding that the city aimed to become a “cradle of tech little dragons” through a series of supporting policies.

Zhejiang officials also called out local companies including Unitree and Rokid, as well as Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen AI model series, as good examples of the province’s hi-tech progress last year. As for Guangdong,Huang Kunming, the province’s Communist Party secretary, said it had continued to expand its hi-tech industrial clusters. The core AI industry in Guangdong had already exceeded 300 billion yuan (US$43 billion) in scale, while the province accounted for about 40 per cent of China’s industrial robot output and 80 per cent of its service robot production, he said.

He added that Guangdong would promote deeper integration between technology development and the needs of industry, fostering coordinated development between manufacturing and services.

“We will use advanced technologies to upgrade modern industries and let industrial demand guide scientific and technological progress,” he said.

The province would also aim to cultivate new industry clusters worth hundreds of billions of yuan up to trillions of yuan in emerging sectors such as 6G, the low-altitude economy, embodied AI and quantum computing, Huang said.

Guangdong has long ranked as the country’s biggest provincial economy, with Jiangsu quickly catching up as Zhejiang pushes aggressively into emerging technologies, buoyed by a cluster of fast-growing start-ups.

Shanghai mayor Gong Zheng on Friday underscored the economic hub’s role as a “vanguard force” in technological innovation at an open panel session of Shanghai National People’s Congress delegates.

“Fostering and developing ‘new quality productive forces’ is key to Shanghai’s push for high-quality development,” Gong said, emphasising the need to pair technology breakthroughs with industrial application.

He said Shanghai would work with neighbouring Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui provinces to advance the Yangtze River Delta international science and technology innovation centre, turning this region into a global technology powerhouse.

The Shanghai session focused on AI. Several deputies spoke about integrating AI across academic disciplines, building ultra-large computing clusters, and “coordinated management of computing power and electricity”, a concept mentioned in Premier Li Qiang’s government work report.Others called for greater capital-market support for technology start-ups and innovation-driven industries.