The 2026 Artificial Intelligence Industry Conference opened in Jinan, Shandong province, running October 14-16. Organized by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) together with Shandong's industry and information technology department and the Jinan municipal government, the conference is themed "accelerating AI empowerment of new-type industrialization" and, after two editions in Beijing, is being held outside the capital for the first time.
More than 300 leading companies and innovation entities joined the industry-matching activities. A compute-infrastructure lineup of Huawei, Inspur, Nvidia, China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom and the Jinan Supercomputing Center was joined by model and application players such as Alibaba, Tencent, NetEase, Feishu, iFlytek and Kuaishou's Kling, while embodied-intelligence firms including Unitree, UBTech, Deep Robotics and Keenon Robotics showed robots. On the demand side, Haier, BYD, Weiqiao, Rizhao Steel, Shandong Heavy Industry, Shandong Port, State Grid and Bank of China exhibited AI applications in manufacturing, energy, ports and finance.
Figures cited at the event underline the shift from "technology hype" to "industrial reality": China's intelligent computing power reached 2,185 EFLOPS by the end of June, up 177 percent year on year, with more than 70 computing corridors built; the core AI industry exceeds 1.2 trillion yuan with over 6,200 related companies; AI penetration in key industries tops 80 percent. More than 30 percent of large industrial enterprises now use AI, supported by a gradient of over 56,000 basic-level, 9,000 advanced-level and 500 excellence-level smart factories.
Source: Xinhua Shandong; CNR; Jinan Publicity
