NDRC Says China's AI-Related Sectors Grew More Than 30% in H1
China's National Development and Reform Commission said on July 31 that AI-related sectors maintained growth above 30% in the first half of 2026. The agency also reported that intelligent computing capacity reached 2.8 times its year-earlier level by the end of June and outlined plans for more application pilots, data sharing and AI governance.
China's National Development and Reform Commission said on July 31 that industries linked to artificial intelligence maintained growth above 30% in the first half of 2026. The figure was presented as a broad indicator of momentum across the country's AI supply chain, not as a growth rate for every AI company or product category.
Compute, models and data
At the commission's July press conference, spokesperson Jiang Yi said China's first domestically produced 100,000-card AI supercluster had entered operation. He also said national intelligent computing capacity at the end of June was 2.8 times its level a year earlier.
The briefing connected that infrastructure expansion to model and data availability. Jiang said Chinese companies including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI had released multiple open-source models with trillion-scale parameter counts, while global downloads of Chinese models had exceeded 10 billion. He added that domestic models and locally produced computing chips were being adapted to work together more quickly.
On data, the commission said China had established more than 120,000 high-quality datasets. Those figures describe capacity, releases and downloads; they do not by themselves measure model quality, commercial adoption or utilization rates.
What the NDRC plans next
The NDRC said it would support basic research and technical development, expand data sharing and AI-language resources, and promote national pilot bases for AI applications. It also described a goal of closer coordination across the model, chip, cloud and application layers.
The policy agenda includes an accelerated legislative process for an AI law, stronger technology monitoring, risk-warning and emergency-response systems, and continued work on international cooperation and governance. The commission did not provide a legislative timetable or detailed implementation rules in the briefing.
For practitioners, the useful signal is the combination of national infrastructure metrics and policy direction. Teams evaluating the Chinese AI market should separate the government's reported buildout and download counts from independent measures of usable compute, model performance and enterprise deployment. The briefing nonetheless shows that infrastructure, open-source models, datasets, application pilots and governance are being treated as one connected industrial program.
Key Points
- 1The NDRC said AI-related sectors in China maintained growth above 30% during the first half of 2026.
- 2The agency reported that intelligent computing capacity reached 2.8 times its year-earlier level by the end of June and that a domestic 100,000-card AI supercluster had entered operation.
- 3Planned next steps include application pilot bases, more data sharing, model-chip-cloud-application coordination and an accelerated AI-law process.
Scoring Rationale
The nationwide H1 metrics and policy roadmap are material signals for teams tracking China's AI infrastructure and governance, while the figures remain government-reported and do not independently establish utilization, model quality or commercial adoption.
Sources
Primary source and supporting public references used for this report.
Practice interview problems based on real data
1,625 SQL & Python problems across 15 industry datasets — the exact type of data you work with.
Try 250 free problems
