On Tuesday, the 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit opens in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province.

At the main forum of the event, humanoid robots and human dancers perform together on the stage.

The 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit concluded on Thursday after a four-day run. Beyond Wuzhen, a profound transformation driven by artificial intelligence is underway in Zhejiang's workshops, laboratories and daily life. Building on years of efforts to deepen the Digital Zhejiang initiative, the province is aiming to become a hub of AI innovation.

In the first eight months, revenue of enterprises above designated size in Zhejiang's core AI industry reached 582.87 billion yuan ($87.2 billion), up 26.9 percent year-on-year. The number of core industry enterprises rose to 2,112, forming a full industry-chain layout spanning chips, large models, intelligent agents and application services.

Computing power is one of the key infrastructure pillars of Zhejiang's AI development. At a sock factory workshop in Zhuji, a designer can generate 20 original patterns within three minutes. In Yiwu, traders rely on an AI computing platform to produce high-definition product images and marketing short videos with a single click.

Powering these AI application scenarios is a province-wide integrated computing network built by China Mobile's Zhejiang branch.

As of the end of September, Zhejiang's total computing power reached 197 EFLOPS (short for ExaFLOPS, a unit of computing performance that quantifies the number of floating-point operations a computer can perform per second), ranking among the highest in the country. Of this, 54 enterprises and institutions in the province received national computing-power vouchers totaling 408 million yuan, accounting for 37 percent of the national total.

"As the Hangzhou and Jiashan intelligent computing centers are put into operation, Zhejiang can achieve millisecond-level access to computing, integrated computing-network scheduling and one-stop security assurance," said Qiu Xiaoyuan, a manager at China Mobile's Zhejiang branch.

Large models are another key factor to the game. With the Qwen and DeepSeek large models iterating continuously, Zhejiang's model ecosystem aims to take the leading position.

In the 2026 government work report of Zhejiang, the province proposed the goal of gaining a leading position in AI development and striving to build a high-quality open-source ecosystem. Open source has been listed as one of the core levers of the province's AI strategy.

Located in Xihu district, Hangzhou, the ModelScope community is among China's largest AI open-source communities. Online, it brings together more than 29 million AI developers and more than 200,000 models worldwide, lowering the threshold for AI-related innovation.

Chen Tianrun, born after 2000, is a doctoral student at Zhejiang University and founder of Moxin Technology, which independently developed MoWorld, a real-time interactive world model built entirely on domestic neural processing units. An NPU is a specialized computer microprocessor designed to mimic the processing function of the human brain.

"The relationship between AI and humans is not about AI replacing humans, but about AI and humans working together to do more to raise productivity," Chen said.

Backed by new production factors such as computing power, models and data, Zhejiang is breaking through its natural-resource constraints to become a trendsetter in innovation.

Drawing on its industrial strength built up over years of hosting the WIC Wuzhen Summit, Tongxiang has welcomed its own AI team — the "Wuzhen Seven". Though these seven companies operate in different industrial sectors, from underlying computing-power cooling to full-vehicle intelligent driving, they are all tied to AI.

In recent years, Zhejiang has continued to strengthen its innovation base and optimize its statistical monitoring system for the industry, establishing a cultivation database for enterprises. To date, more than 2,000 enterprises have been registered in the database and 189 have been nurtured as national-level "little giant" enterprises. These are small and medium-sized enterprises that boast cutting-edge technologies and specialize in niche sectors.

Earlier in 2026, five Zhejiang provincial departments jointly issued an action plan for promoting the development of the AI terminal industry, putting the development of diverse terminals on the agenda with priority support.

An official of the provincial government said Zhejiang will build a"4+6+X" AI terminal industry system, creating a cluster centered on Hangzhou, Ningbo and Jiaxing cities, with Wenzhou, Huzhou, Shaoxing, Jinhua, Quzhou and Taizhou as key linkages.

In the field of AI, one-person companies are emerging. Currently, Zhejiang's OPCs are developing rapidly and have become an important vehicle for promoting the scaled application of AI. However, practitioners still face many difficulties such as the high costs of computing power access. On Oct 28, Zhejiang issued a notice on supporting the pioneering development and pilot programs of AI OPCs in Hangzhou and other cities, in a bid to build up a multitiered AI development landscape.