AI has become a key industrial focus vigorously pursued by regions across China. Since 2025, Jiangsu has seized the opportunities brought by the AI industry to foster new competitive advantages for high-quality economic development.

In 2025, the added value of Jiangsu’s core digital industries reached 1.61 trillion yuan, accounting for 11.8% of the province’s GDP. The added value of the manufacturing sector for core digital products above designated size rose by 10.2% year on year, 3.7 percentage points higher than the growth rate of industries above designated size as a whole. During the year, focusing on the digital industry, Jiangsu rolled out policies to support innovation and development of the AI terminal sector and the brain-computer interface, with a host of collaborative platforms emerging, including Jiangsu Low-Altitude Intelligent Connected Perception Alliance and Jiangsu Industrial Alliance of Embodied Intelligent Robots, lending strong support for the province to gain an edge in the new round of technological revolution.

In recent years, Jiangsu’s economy has seen sustained transformation and upgrading. The five prefecture-level cities in South Jiangsu, namely, Nanjing, Wuxi, Changzhou, Suzhou, and Zhenjiang, have taken digital technologies as a breakthrough, housing the vast majority of the province’s digital enterprises. Among them, Nanjing’s software business revenue exceeded one trillion yuan for the first time. In 2025, Jiangsu vigorously promoted the application of industrial software, and encouraged Nanjing, Wuxi and Suzhou to build new-type industrial software innovation platforms. Fifteen IT innovative application cases and 34 IT innovative application solutions from across the province were selected as national models, while Nantong and Xuzhou were included in the third batch of national pilot cities for digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Meanwhile, Jiangsu has addressed weak links in its industrial chains, supported leading enterprises on the industrial chain in pooling upstream and downstream innovation resources, and advanced breakthroughs in core technologies. A total of 31 products were certified as first-edition software, and 19 were recommended as new technologies and new products. Key enterprises were organized to participate in the open competition in fields such as brain-computer interface, metaverse, general AI and atomic-level manufacturing, launched by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, to select the best candidates to lead innovation projects of future industries. Progress was made in key sectors including wide bandgap semiconductors, automotive chips and large silicon wafers. A digital technology innovation platform was built, and enterprises were encouraged to accelerate R&D and supply of generic technologies in cloud platforms, AI frameworks, underlying algorithms and advanced communications. Efforts were stepped up to develop digital economy infrastructure, with the comprehensive computing power index ranking second nationwide and 23,000 5G base stations newly built.

Jiangsu has seized opportunities brought by the new round of global industrial revolution driven by information technology to build new manufacturing strengths. From smart workshops and smart factories to 5G-enabled factories, Jiangsu’s integration index of industrialization and information technology reached 71.2, ranking first in China for 11 consecutive years. The application rate of digital R&D tools, digital control rate of key procedures and rate of digital management have all risen substantially in enterprises. Enabled by smart manufacturing, Jiangsu’s manufacturing enterprises have forged new competitiveness with better quality, higher efficiency and lower costs, generating higher industrial profits than the rest of the country while maintaining steady industrial growth.