Artificial AI users surpass 700 million in China

The results were announced this week by the Institute of International Policy and Cooperation of the China Internet Information Center. Of these, 47.8% use generative artificial intelligence to process images or videos, 37.6% for text-related tasks, and 32.5% to prepare work summaries, meeting minutes or presentation slides. In addition, Chinese users' use of general-purpose AI assistants and productivity tools will double by 2025.

According to China Daily, China has prioritized expanding the artificial intelligence industry as a strategic goal in recent years. In particular, the country aims to build more domestic computing capacity, reduce dependence on foreign technology, and accelerate the deployment of artificial intelligence throughout the economy. Having more than half of the population using it is a milestone that shows that AI is becoming a part of everyday life.

In addition, more than 30% of large manufacturing companies are using AI, with applications ranging from research and design, manufacturing, quality inspection to maintenance. By the end of June, China had developed 16 national advanced manufacturing clusters, focusing on digital industries, including integrated circuits and artificial intelligence.

Also according to the report, China's AI computing capacity currently reached 2,185 EFLOPS, or exaFLOPS (each EFLOPS is equivalent to one trillion floating-point operations per second) as of the end of June, an increase of 177% over the same period last year. In the first half of the year alone, the country put into operation the first self-developed AI super cluster consisting of 100,000 acceleration systems, completely using chips, computing, storage, networking and cooling systems using domestic technology.

With the AI ​​model, domestic companies such as DeepSeek or Moonshot AI have released many open source products. The top six open source models in the global rankings were all developed by Chinese research teams and tweaked to run on domestically designed computing chips.

China will also build more than 120,000 high-quality datasets by mid-2026 to develop an ecosystem linking national computing power, models and data. Regarding embodied artificial intelligence (Embodied AI), which means models that combine AI with physical machines such as robots, China recorded rapid development with more than 400 new humanoid robot models being born, the yearly production scale is expected to exceed 100,000 units.

In addition, capital flows were also very strong, recording 1,255 investment and financial transactions related to AI in the first half of 2026, equivalent to 78% of the total transactions recorded in the whole of 2025. Total transactions reached about 250.14 billion yuan (37.32 billion USD) and equivalent to 182% of the amount raised in the whole of last year.

Bao Lam