Guangdong now has over 3,700 AI and robotics companies, new white paper says

Summary

At the 2025 Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area AI & Robotics Industry Conference in Guangzhou, organizers released a provincial industry white paper and a related “Pearl River Index” report. The report claims Guangdong has surpassed 3,700 AI and robotics companies (with more than 2,000 described as AI “core” companies), and places the province in China’s top tier nationally on multiple industrial indicators. It also frames Guangdong’s 2024 AI core-industry scale at roughly RMB 220 billion and cites a sizable smart-robotics revenue base, reinforcing the region’s role as both an applications hub and a hardware-heavy supply chain center. The deeper implication for the global AI race: the densest AI competition may increasingly be decided not just by model labs, but by regions that can industrialize AI quickly—where talent pipelines, component ecosystems, and downstream manufacturing sit in the same geography.