China’s AI factories show shift from consumer apps to smart industry

This piece is a useful reminder that China’s AI bet is not just chatbots and image models; it’s about rewiring factories. From Huawei‑backed "dark" EV plants to rubber factories where 95% of core equipment is numerically controlled, the story describes how algorithms are quietly becoming production supervisors, adjusting workflows and coordinating fleets of robots in real time. That’s a different flavor of AI progress than leaderboard‑chasing LLMs, but it’s strategically important because it builds deep domain expertise, proprietary data and sticky deployments in the real economy.([news.az](https://news.az/news/china-s-ai-shift-moves-from-screens-to-shop-floors))

For the AGI race, industrial AI is a force multiplier. The same firms deploying perception, planning and control systems on shop floors are also the ones with the incentive (and cash flow) to keep pushing frontier models that can reason about supply chains, maintenance and design. Over time, those capabilities bleed back into general‑purpose agents: an AI that can optimize thousands of process steps in a car plant isn’t far from one that can autonomously manage complex service workflows.

The article also underscores China’s structural advantages: a vast manufacturing base, an enormous engineering workforce, and policy support via initiatives like “AI Plus” and smart‑factory pilots. That combination makes it more likely that China’s path to AGI will be tightly coupled to industrial upgrading – with factories, not smartphones, as the primary proving grounds.