Shanghai Boosts AI Corporate Development With Additional Funds

Shanghai will add another 1 billion yuan (US$146 million) annually in the next five years to facilitate corporate development in artificial intelligence, Tang Wenkan, director of the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Informatization, told a media briefing on Monday.

The conference was held to introduce Shanghai's industry-specific guidelines for the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), with Shanghai Mayor Gong Zheng also attending.

The fund will be offered together with scaled-up policy support in the city's "AI Plus" initiative to fuel growth of new business forms such as Online Personal Creators, enabling enterprises to develop first before paying for the resources such as computing power, corpora and AI models, Tang said.

To meet corporate financing needs, Shanghai will also leverage the 22.5-billion-yuan municipal AI pilot fund and coordinate with the 60-billion yuan national AI fund to deliver coordinated support.

Shanghai has been be a frontrunner in China's AI progress.

The city has established a number of incubators to nurture the AI ecosystem featuring integrated upstream and downstream industrial chains, such as the SMC Shanghai Foundation Model Innovation Center, MOLI Community, Zhangjiang and Beiyang AI Innovation Town.

Also, the city has established the Intelligence Innovation Academy, which has enrolled over 800 PhD candidates specializing in AI in less than two years. It also provides training for Frontier Deployment Engineers (FDE) to accelerate AI's industrial application.

Shanghai has built the country's first industrial corpus service platform to support the coordinated development of open-source foundational models, commercial foundational models and vertical industry-specific models across the city, with 158 models already getting approved.

Shanghai's intelligent computing scale currently exceeds 160,000 PetaFLOPS, accounting for roughly 8 percent of the national total, and a number of domestically developed high-performance AI chips have achieved major breakthroughs.