The 2026 Artificial Intelligence Industry Conference opened in Jinan, Shandong, on October 15 under the theme of 'accelerating AI empowerment of new industrialization,' building a high-level platform for sharing deployment practices and deepening the integration of frontier technology with the real economy.
As a key research output, the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center's Data Security Institute released its 2026 Study and Trend Assessment of China's Vertical-Domain Large Models, analyzing 61 representative vertical models nationwide across 13 fields to help demand-side users quickly match suitable models. Shandong alone had 11 models selected - nearly one-sixth of the total.
In 2025, China's AI core industry scale exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan with more than 6,200 AI enterprises, placing the country's overall strength in the global first tier. Large models, as the capability hub of the AI industry, are shifting from early technical exploration to specialized, scenario-based application, with vertical models grounded in high-quality industry data and domain expertise entering real business processes faster.
Shandong is leaning into that shift: in the first half of 2026 its AI core-industry revenue surpassed 85 billion yuan, up 33.2%, with more than 170 monitored large-model firms and models embedding into core processes across all 41 of the province's industrial categories.
Image: Efficiency of AI-related computer chips. Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
