Industrial upgrade pivots on digital tech

China will intensify efforts to leverage innovative digital technologies to bolster industrial upgrade and foster strategic emerging and future-oriented industries, as part of its broader push to promote the high-quality development of the digital economy and nurture new quality productive forces, said officials and experts.

They made the remarks at the opening ceremony of the China International Big Data Industry Expo 2025, which kicked off on Thursday in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province.

The expo, which runs through Saturday, features a diverse range of exchanges and activities, with more than 16,000 guests and 375 enterprises participating.

Hao Mingjin, vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the 14th National People's Congress, China's top legislature, said that heightened efforts should be made to give full play to the role of data as a fundamental resource and an engine for innovation, promote the in-depth integration of the real and digital economies, and accelerate the development of artificial intelligence.

There is a pressing need to further deepen reforms related to the market-oriented allocation of data elements, establish and improve basic data systems, cultivate the data industry ecosystem and expand international cooperation in the digital economy domain, Hao said.

Noting that data serves as a new type of production factor, Zhuang Rongwen, head of the Cyberspace Administration of China, highlighted the significance of cultivating new growth drivers for industrial transformation and upgrading, deeply implementing the "AI Plus" initiative and building a modern industrial system.

He called for efforts to raise people's digital literacy, improve the rules and systems in the digital field, promote efficient, convenient and secure cross-border data flows, and strengthen AI security governance.

China's digital economy has gained strong momentum in recent years. According to the National Data Administration, the country's total data output reached 41.06 zettabytes last year, marking a robust 25 percent year-on-year increase.

Liu Liehong, head of the National Data Administration, said that China has rolled out nearly 30 policy measures related to the development and utilization of public data resources and urban digital transformation. It has also advanced the construction of data infrastructure, such as a national integrated computing power network, while expanding the application scenarios of data in a wide range of sectors, he said.

The added value of China's digital economy is expected to stand at around 49 trillion yuan ($6.9 trillion) by the end of this year, accounting for about 35 percent of GDP, according to Liu.

He noted that the country's total intelligent computing capacity has reached around 780,000 PFlops, ranking second globally. PFlops, or petaflops, is a unit of measurement for computational performance, representing 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

Liu also emphasized the importance of high-quality and large-scale data in advancing the "AI Plus" initiative.

Statistics from the National Data Development Research Institute show that the number of data enterprises in China surpassed 400,000 in 2024, while the market scale of the nation's data industry reached 5.86 trillion yuan.

Xu Lin, Party secretary of Gui-zhou, said the province will seize the strategic opportunity brought by the explosive growth of AI to vigorously develop the computing power industry with a key focus on intelligent computing, as well as develop the data industry and AI industry centered on industry-specific large models.

Jiang Xiaojuan, a professor at the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the application of data across various fields "has injected new momentum into China's industrial development", adding that the industrialization of digital and AI technologies will significantly improve operational efficiency and lower costs.

The digital economy has played a vital role in bolstering the transformation of manufacturing, services, consumption and international trade, and in driving overall economic growth, Jiang said.

Yang Jie, chairman of China Mobile, the world's largest telecom carrier in terms of mobile subscribers, said the scale and quality of data have become a driving force for accelerating AI innovation and breakthroughs.

Yang added that China Mobile is beefing up efforts to increase the supply of high-quality data, boost the efficient circulation of data and speed up the high-level utilization of data, in order to push forward the deeper integration of data with various areas of the economy and society.

Contact the writers at fanfeifei@chinadaily.com.cn