2025 World AI Conference to be held in Shanghai

The 2025 World AI Conference & High-level Meeting on Global AI Governance will be held in Shanghai from July 26 to 28, focusing on the 10 major sectors of artificial intelligence infrastructure, scientific intelligence, smart devices, AI-empowered new-type industrialization and AI's integration with finance, said the organizer during a press conference on July 10.

More than 1,200 guests from over 30 countries and regions will attend this year's WAIC, including 12 winners of international top-notch awards such as the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize, over 80 academicians from home and abroad and representatives from the world's leading labs.

The 2025 WAIC marks the eighth edition of the event and will feature an exhibition area exceeding 70,000 square meters for the first time. Among the 800 participating companies, half are from outside Shanghai, including other Chinese cities and international markets. At least 60 industry leaders — such as Siemens and Schneider Electric — as well as 50 State-owned enterprises will showcase their latest products and services.

More than 3,000 frontier products will be demonstrated at this year's WAIC, including 40 large language models, 50 AI-powered devices and 60 robots. It should be noted that over 100 products will make their China or world debut at this year's WAIC, hitting a new record.

For the first time, the conference will feature a dedicated area for venture investment and incubation. More than 200 startup projects from China and abroad will hold roadshows in this zone, offering opportunities to connect with over 100 investment institutions, said Zhang Ying, director of the Shanghai Economic and Informatization Commission, during the news conference on July 10.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will release at the WAIC's forums its latest progress in AI development, said Du Guangda, deputy head of the ministry's science and technology department. These include a cooperation network among BRICS countries, a guideline for governance and identification of industry applications empowered by AI, a service platform for supply and demand matching in AI-powered industrial applications, and an industry map of humanoid robots, he said.

Over the past seven editions, WAIC attracted the participation of over 6,000 industry leaders and the online discussion of more than 2.5 billion people.

By the end of the first quarter, the total industrial output of Shanghai-based AI companies — each with an annual revenue of at least 20 million yuan ($2.8 million) — had exceeded 118 billion yuan, up 29 percent year-on-year. Their total profit increased by 65 percent over the same period, according to Zhang Ying of the Shanghai Economic and Informatization Commission.

"AI has become a new engine for Shanghai's economic growth," she said.

Zhang said that the city's smart computing supply capacity will exceed 100 EFlops by the end of this year. Public data shows that China's total computing power scale was around 246 EFlops at the end of 2024, among which 15 EFlops were contributed by Shanghai.

According to the three-year action plan to facilitate the development of the Shanghai-based high-growth enterprises, which was released on Wednesday, the municipal government said that special support will be given to these companies for renting the city's computing power to develop LLMs. The support will be a maximum of 30 percent of the contract value, or no more than 40 million yuan in total.

Meanwhile, Shanghai launched last year the country's first corpus operation platform. In AI, a corpus refers to a large and structured collection of texts used for training machine learning models.

In addition, more than 82 LLMs developed by Shanghai-based companies have been registered with the top regulators.