- New East China plant in Zhejiang’s Jinhua targets annual output of 100,000 AI PCs.
- Chip partnership signals deeper push for self-reliant AI hardware ecosystem.
iFlytek, one of China’s earliest AI leaders, began mass production of domestically developed AI personal computers on March 27 in Zhejiang’s Jinhua City, marking a new step in China’s effort to build a self-reliant computing ecosystem as demand grows for secure, locally powered AI hardware.
The first device rolled off the production line at the company’s East China manufacturing base in Wucheng District of Jinhua, officially launching a facility designed to produce up to 100,000 AI PCs annually.
The project follows a strategic cooperation agreement signed on February 27 between iFlytek and the Zhejiang provincial government to expand collaboration in education, healthcare, governance and information-technology innovation.
Local officials see the factory as a cornerstone for positioning Jinhua as a hub for AI terminal manufacturing while strengthening the Yangtze River Delta’s domestically controlled technology supply chain.
“In the future, iFlytek will rely on the East China manufacturing base to continuously enhance production capacity for domestically developed hardware terminals and leverage ecosystem collaboration to promote large-scale, secure AI adoption across industries,” a company spokesman said at the launch ceremony.
The plant integrates seven digital management systems — including ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), WMS (Warehouse Management System) and MES (Manufacturing Execution System) platforms — enabling closed-loop oversight from component intake to final shipment.
Production relies on an intelligent flexible assembly line equipped with robotic handling systems capable of micron-level precision. Each device can be traced across its lifecycle within three seconds, while production lines can switch configurations within two hours to accommodate multiple domestic chip architectures.
This has become a key requirement as China diversifies away from foreign processors, according to a statement from iFlytek.
Before shipment, every unit undergoes stress testing under high computational loads, running iFlytek’s proprietary Xinghuo large language model (LLM) simultaneously across several Chinese-developed chips to verify reliability and computing security at the device level, the statement added.
At the launch ceremony, iFlytek also announced a strategic partnership with Loongson Technology Corp., a state-run domestic chipmaker, aimed at integrating the Xinghuo model more deeply with domestically designed processors.
The collaboration seeks to address industry-wide challenges in running large AI models on edge devices, combining software optimization with hardware co-development to close gaps in localized alternatives.
Founded in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province, in 1999, iFlytek has built an end-to-end ecosystem spanning domestically trained foundation models, multimodal AI agents and industry applications across education, healthcare and automotive sectors.
While the company benefits from tight integration across software and hardware layers, performance limitations of domestic computing chips compared with global leaders continue to constrain model scale and complex reasoning capabilities — a gap that Beijing-backed innovation efforts are increasingly focused on narrowing.
