China says core AI industry tops 1 trillion yuan in 2025

China is signaling that AI is no longer an aspirational sector but a core industrial pillar, at least as Beijing defines it. A 1‑trillion‑yuan "core" AI industry figure should be read cautiously—these categories are politically constructed—but it still reflects massive state-backed investment in models, chips, software and application startups. The Ministry’s emphasis on AI alongside integrated circuits, new materials and aerospace shows that China sees AI as part of a broader push to secure high‑tech self‑reliance.([globaltimes.cn](https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202512/1351611.shtml))

In the race to AGI, this announcement reinforces that Chinese policy is not pivoting away from frontier AI despite global safety debates. Instead, it is doubling down on industrial scale and indigenous supply chains: more local fabs, more high‑tech manufacturing, and a huge long‑tail of AI‑enabled SMEs. That provides a wide deployment base for domestic labs like Baidu, Alibaba, ByteDance and up‑and‑coming model shops to test and monetize increasingly advanced systems, even as export controls throttle access to top‑end U.S. GPUs. Over time, that deployment base can generate the proprietary data, domain expertise and revenue needed to fund Chinese contenders in the frontier‑model race.

The flip side is that state-framed success metrics (like hitting trillion‑yuan thresholds) can create incentives to over‑report or to prioritize visible growth over robustness and safety. For global regulators and competitors, understanding exactly what sits inside China’s "core AI" bucket will be crucial when benchmarking capabilities and risks.