China's generative artificial intelligence user base has surpassed 700 million people, with penetration above 50 percent, according to the Report on the Development of Generative AI Applications (2026) released by the China Internet Network Information Center at a Beijing conference and publicized on October 21.
The report shows adoption broadening across scenarios: 76 percent of users ask AI questions, while image and video processing (47.8 percent), text work (37.6 percent) and office documents such as summaries and slides (32.5 percent) follow. Usage of AI assistants and productivity-office apps more than doubled year on year, and 38.7 percent of netizens bought smart hardware in the past six months, led by wearables.
On the supply side, China's smart-computing capacity reached 2,185 EFLOPS by June 2026, up 177 percent year on year, and the country's first fully homegrown 100,000-card AI super cluster went into service with domestic chips, storage and networking across the stack. Chinese teams now occupy the top six spots on global mainstream model-usage leaderboards, and more than 120,000 high-quality datasets have been built. Investment is following: the first half of 2026 saw 1,255 AI financing deals worth about 250.14 billion yuan, respectively 78 percent and 182 percent of full-year 2025 levels.
Source: CNNIC report via CCTV News/CNR, October 21, 2026
