Shanghai’s rising tech community will soon find a home in Huangpu, the latest instalment of its homegrown Silicon Valley, Chinese media reported.
Following the successes of Shenzhen’s Nanshan and Beijing’s Zhonguancun districts, Huangpu is racing to bring in top companies developing artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.
The region recently announced the news at both the Huangpu Science and Technology Investment Promotion Conference and the Metaverse Developers Conference.
The conferences ran parallel to the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), with the three events showcasing emerging technologies for a multitude of use cases in smart cities, spatial computing, fintech, robotics, healthcare, human-computer interfacing (HCI), and AI.
Huangpu is hosting the umbrella of digital tools under its X-Tech innovation ecosystem. Shanghai’s renowned district for banking, finance, government, and culture is nestled along the Huangpu River and features the Bund, rife with colonial-era promenades on one end and future-proof skyrises on the other side.
Taking the region’s innovation strategy even further, the government said that Huangpu aims to become a future metaverse hub for the nation. The article added it hosted four out of the first ten top metaverse applications and offered robust 5G networks for metaverse testbeds, Gao Yun, Huangpu Party Secretary explained as quoted by Shine.
China Leads in Generative AI Adoption — Survey
The news comes after China took the top spot in generative AI adoption, according to a survey cited in a Reuters report.
SAS and Coleman Parkes Research conducted the joint survey after canvassing 1,600 participants. 83 percent of Chinese respondents incorporated generative AI in their technology stacks, the survey noted.
Additionally, the United Kingdom came in a close second at 70 percent, the United States at 65 percent, and Australia at 63 percent, respectively.
However, the survey noted,
“[…] Organisations in the United States are ahead in terms of maturity and having fully implemented GenAI technologies at 24% compared to China’s 19, and the United Kingdom’s 11%.”
Reuters also showed that a United Nations World Intellecutal Property Organisation report found that China filed over 38,000 patents for GenAI technologies from 2014 to 2023, compared to the United States’ 6,276.
Along with China’s leading companies like ByteDance, Tencent, and Huawei, the country’s domestic tech giants are competing with their US counterparts like Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and others.
Despite ongoing issues with the US trade war on China triggering a split in the development of emerging technologies, the nation has remained one of the world’s leading contributors to innovation, patents, and technological progress.
Shanghai: Leader of the Digital World?
This comes as Shanghai pushes to become a major global metaverse hub, competing with some of the world’s top spots such as Dubai, London, California’s Silicon Valley, and many others.
The regional government contributed 350 billion yuan, or $52bn USD, in funding to support the initiative in a bid to reach its goal by 2025.
With the financial support, Shanghai’s metaverse powerhouse hopes to boost “cutting-edge technological breakthroughs” by building the nation’s semiconductor, virtual, augmented, and mixed reality devices, as well as cloud computing, 5G and other infrastructure types.
At the time, a government spokesperson said the massive initiative would:
“strengthen the agglomeration of digital content companies and application scenarios, actively introduce international e-sports companies, well-known clubs, and event organizations to settle down, and speed up key factors such as virtual digital humans, graphics engines, cloud rendering, holographic imaging, artificial intelligence automatic generation, naked-eye 3D, 8K, [and others]”
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