China is experiencing a systemic expansion of its national data infrastructure driven by artificial intelligence, transforming from public channels for data circulation into a foundational base for the intelligent era.
Experts speaking at key industry events this week, including the 2026 China International Big Data Industry Expo in Guiyang and the HICOOL 2026 Global Entrepreneur Summit in Beijing, highlighted this rapid evolution.
Ao Li, vice president of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said during a thematic session in Guiyang that national data infrastructure supports cross regional, cross industry and cross entity data circulation. Ao noted that infrastructure construction has moved from exploration into a new phase of collaborative advancement in construction and application, already covering 15 industries and more than 50 cities.
Demand for data continues to grow. A survey by China’s National Data Bureau shows the proportion of leading enterprises using external data for model training rose from 54 percent to 74.36 percent within one year, with high quality data volume increasing by 142.58 percent during the same period. Statistics for 2025 indicate the total amount of data used for AI training and reasoning in China reached 199.48 exabytes, with reasoning data volume exceeding training data volume for the first time.
Infrastructure must shift from one time resource delivery to a continuous multi modal supply covering the entire lifecycle of models, Ao said. Multimodal data has become a central focus for large models, expanding the objects of infrastructure management beyond data files to include real world objects, events, and temporal relationships. Data delivery is also transitioning from manually initiated, one time operations to autonomous discovery that runs routinely according to set rules.
While Guiyang hosted discussions on high level infrastructure, Beijing demonstrated the resulting applications and ecosystem, showcasing a complete AI chain from foundation models to terminal devices. The Haidian district in Beijing is emerging as a core source for AI basic research, integrating top universities and mature supply chains.
Startups at the Haidian exhibition zone displayed various innovations, including desktop robots that adjust screen angles based on the user’s posture and companions designed with active intelligence to understand human social signals through visual and auditory inputs.
