By Wu Siya

BEIJING, Apr. 30 (China Economic Net) – The latest data shows that as of April 9, 2025, China's artificial intelligence (AI) patent applications have reached 1,576,379, accounting for 38.58% of the global applications, ranking first in the globe.

“China’s accomplishment in artificial intelligence stems from a synergistic interplay of domestic innovation ecosystems and proactive global collaboration,” Xu Shan, Deputy Director of International Cooperation and Technical Service Department, CAICT AI Institute, told China Economic Net.

AI smart fitness assistant [Photo/ CEN]

At present, China has cultivated more than 400 national-level specialized "little giant" enterprises (innovation-driven small and medium-sized enterprises, which own core technologies in a niche market and show great market potential) in the field of AI, accounting for one-tenth of the global industry scale.

By now, China has formed a complete artificial intelligence industry system covering the basic layer, framework layer, model layer, and application layer.

“China’s AI ecosystem leverages vertical integration across foundational research, application development, and market deployment, supported by a mature industrial infrastructure,” Xu emphasized. “Government-backed clusters like “Shanghai to make itself highland for industrial innovation in AI”, while targeted policies empower SMEs and startups to advance specialized fields such as robotics through niche innovations.”

A staff introduce AI sports glasses to foreign buyers [Photo/CEN]

Research and development in related fields has never stopped. Lately, China's independently developed new generation of intelligent CNC system was officially released. This is the world's first CNC system that integrates AI chips and AI large models. It can increase the operating accuracy of industrial mother machines by 30% on the basis of the original micron level, and the processing efficiency will also be increased by 5%-10%, which will drive China's industrial mother machines to accelerate their entry into the middle and high end of the industrial chain.

“The leap forward of our AI industry is inseparable from the timely support of the government,” introduced Wu Jun, a member of the Chinese Computer Vision Expert Committee. “While many countries were still waiting and watching, China had already quickly determined the overall development policy of AI. Therefore, the explosive development in the past few years should be said to be a natural process of quantitative to qualitative change.”

Wu Jun pointed out that the “AI+” strategy could effectively cultivate new quality productive forces through domestic cross-industry collaboration. For instance, major e-commerce and social platforms rely on new information infrastructure and massive user data to deeply integrate big data analysis, algorithms, cloud computing to boost the intelligent upgrading of industries and form a virtuous circle.

In 2024, the scale of China’s AI industry has exceeded 700 billion yuan, maintaining a growth rate of more than 20% for many consecutive years. By 2025, the market size is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan, and by 2035, it is expected to grow to 1.7 trillion yuan, with a compound annual growth rate of 15.6%, among which embodied intelligence and multimodal systems will become important growth points.