Zhejiang doubles down on AI as core growth engine for 2026

Zhejiang’s work report reads like a microcosm of China’s broader AI industrial strategy: lock in early investments in models, data, compute and application ecosystems, then weaponize the province’s dense network of private firms to turn that stack into GDP. The emphasis on institutions like Alibaba Cloud, DeepSeek and ZhiJiang Lab—alongside a 20%+ jump in AI core industry revenue to roughly 680 billion yuan—signals that local governments are being judged on how aggressively they convert AI hype into measurable industrial output.

For the race to AGI, this matters because it shows how quickly sub‑national actors are scaling up their own "AI action plans" in response to Beijing’s national directives. When a province of 65 million people treats foundation models, humanoid robots and open‑source communities like Modai (“魔搭社区”) as strategic infrastructure, it effectively creates another pocket of frontier‑adjacent capability. That both intensifies global competition and broadens the set of stakeholders who care about long‑term compute access, data rights and export controls.

Zhejiang’s framing of AI as a tool to transform everything from rubber factories to healthcare trial sites also highlights a growing divide: the same models that enable local productivity gains are the ones most likely to be scaled toward AGI. How these provincial ecosystems handle safety, open‑sourcing and cross‑border partnerships will quietly shape global norms.