Hefei becomes 18th city in China's national AI pilot zone program
China's industrial AI policy machine keeps adding cities to its national pilot-zone program — this week it was Hefei's turn, and the designation comes with some of the most interesting numbers yet on domestic compute.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has approved Hefei to build a National AI Industry Innovation Application Pilot Zone, making the city the 18th member of a program that already includes Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou. The zones exist to push AI deeper into the real economy — piloting policies, opening up application scenarios, and testing new products at scale before they spread nationwide. Hefei's approval, announced by the Hefei Daily over the weekend, is the kind of incremental policy step that tends to pass quietly, but the infrastructure behind it is anything but routine.
What makes Hefei notable is the hardware-first bet it has been building. The city claims China's first 10,000-card domestic compute cluster and its first quantum-supercomputing fusion center, with managed compute capacity already past 25,800 petaflops and expected to break 40,000 by year-end. It has also tied compute to a city-level "compute pool" that connects 21 service providers and links into the national supercomputing internet. On the model side, iFlytek's Spark — trained entirely on domestic chips — is the marquee name, and the local industry chain now counts 1,500 AI companies pulling in more than 100 billion yuan in revenue. The application stats are just as aggressive: AI-assisted education covering more than 60,000 schools and 160 million students, and AI-assisted medical diagnosis across 800-plus counties totaling over 1.1 billion consultations.
The take: this is the "AI + new industrialization" playbook running at full speed. Hefei's designation is less a research win than a deployment mandate — the zone's stated focus areas are AI-empowered manufacturing and what officials are calling the "agent internet." For readers watching the US–China compute race, the meaningful signal is that domestic-compute training (the Spark cluster) is no longer a novelty in China's industrial cities; it's becoming the default template for new zones. The pilot-zone program is how Beijing turns scattered local experiments into national standards, and Hefei just signed up with the hardware to back it.
What to watch: whether the "agent internet" pilots the zone is tasked with produce anything concrete, and which city gets the 19th slot.
Eighteen zones and counting — do China's AI pilot cities actually deliver, or is the designation mostly a ribbon? Tell us in the comments.
