On September 4, 2026, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the 'Artificial Intelligence SME Entrepreneurship Support Plan (2026-2028),' a three-year program to newly cultivate more than 10,000 technology and innovation-oriented small and medium enterprises and 2,000 specialized 'little giant' firms.
The plan's most notable signal is a clear tilt from "courting the giants" toward "supporting the small." For the first time in such industrial policy, it explicitly encourages local governments to inclusively support micro-entities such as "one-person companies" and "super individuals," recognizing that as large models lower the barriers to R&D, design and content production, the minimum viable scale of a venture is being rewritten.
A second keyword is inclusive computing power. The plan deepens a special action to empower SMEs with affordable computing, pooling and elastically allocating resources through China's national computing platform to give startups efficient, low-cost access - compared by analysts to the "electrification" of the AI era, where only cheap, ubiquitous compute can unleash a wave of entrepreneurship.
Image: Efficiency improvement of AI-related computer chips. Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC0).
