China AI core industry tops 1 trillion yuan, MIIT touts 2026 push

Crossing 1 trillion yuan in “core AI industry” output is less about an exact number and more about Beijing planting a flag: AI is no longer an emerging niche, it’s a central industrial pillar on par with semiconductors and autos. MIIT’s messaging around emerging sectors and embodied intelligence suggests that China wants to move beyond pure model training into robots, industrial AI, and domain‑specific applications that anchor the technology in physical and economic infrastructure.

For the race to AGI, this matters in two ways. First, it signals that China’s state apparatus is willing to underwrite AI as a long‑term industrial strategy, not just a hyped tech wave. That means more subsidies for compute, talent pipelines, and “future industries” like humanoid robots, which are natural testbeds for advanced world‑model‑style systems. Second, it reinforces a divergence from the U.S. model: rather than a few giant private labs dominating, China is nurturing a broad base of high‑tech manufacturers, SMEs and local champions around AI.

The result is a more vertically integrated ecosystem where advances in models, chips, and real‑world deployment can reinforce one another. If that ecosystem continues to mature, it could give Chinese labs distinctive strengths in embodied and industrial AGI use cases, even if frontier model benchmarks remain a more contested space.