China AI core industry tops ¥1T as MIIT sets 2026 priorities

China passing the symbolic 1‑trillion‑yuan mark for its AI core industry is less about a precise number and more about signaling political commitment. The work‑conference readout pairs that figure with aggressive stats on national compute clusters, AI chip launches, 35,000+ high‑quality datasets and a roster of competitive domestic models such as DeepSeek and Tongyi Qianwen.([chinanews.com.cn](https://www.chinanews.com.cn/cj/2025/12-26/10541065.shtml)) Taken together, Beijing is saying that it now has the full stack—chips, data, models and industrial use cases—needed to treat AI as a pillar industry on par with autos or telecoms.

For the race to AGI, this matters because it underscores that China is not just sprinting on foundation model capabilities but building the surrounding industrial ecosystem: smart factories, humanoid robots, 5G/industrial 5G, and sector‑specific "AI+manufacturing" programs. Those downstream deployments generate the messy, real‑world data that next‑generation embodied and agentic systems need. At the same time, the story reminds us that China’s AI push is tightly fused with state planning; advances in frontier models and robotics are being steered toward strategic sectors, from export‑oriented manufacturing to green industry. That mix of scale, coordination and long‑term capital is exactly what you’d expect from a serious AGI contender.