China launches national AI virtual film lab to lead virtual production

China’s new AI + virtual film lab is about much more than prettier green‑screen effects. By explicitly targeting an “AI virtual production flagship base” with national‑level backing, Beijing is treating generative media, simulation, and virtual sets as strategic industrial technologies. The lab’s remit—domestic key‑tech R&D, mid‑scale pilot incubation, full‑process AI virtual production platforms and standards—reads like a template for how the state wants to industrialize AIGC across culture and entertainment.([tech.sina.cn](https://tech.sina.cn/mobile/xp/2026-02-04/detail-inhkrtwh3018961.d.html?vt=4))

From an AGI‑race lens, high‑end virtual production is a pressure cooker for multimodal models that must understand scenes, lighting, physics and narrative continuity while generating controllable outputs at scale. The more film workflows are rebuilt around AI co‑creation—from concept art and pre‑viz to on‑set virtual cinematography—the more training data and real‑world constraints future embodied and simulation‑heavy AGI systems will be exposed to. China’s bet is that a state‑supported hub can accelerate that feedback loop, fuse academic and industrial talent, and set de facto standards for how AI tools plug into production pipelines. That could give Chinese studios and tool vendors an edge in next‑generation creative platforms, even as Hollywood wrestles more cautiously with labor and IP issues.