- City’s compute scale hits 5.6 exaflops equivalent
- AI industry revenue grows over 23%
Hangzhou has emerged as one of China’s leading artificial intelligence hubs, with total computing capacity reaching the equivalent of 5.6 exaflops, ranking second nationwide, a local official said.
The figure, disclosed by Wang Yongfang, head of the Hangzhou Municipal Bureau of Commerce, at a briefing on the China (Zhejiang) Pilot Free Trade Zone on April 20, underscores the city’s push to build out infrastructure for AI development and deployment.
In supercomputing terms, one exaflop equals 10¹⁸ floating-point operations per second, a key benchmark for measuring AI processing power.
The city trails only Beijing in total computing capacity, according to industry data, reflecting the capital’s concentration of national-level data centers and research institutions.
Hangzhou’s AI sector has expanded alongside this growth. The city hosts 395 core AI companies, generating about 460 billion yuan ($67.47 billion) in revenue, up 23.1% from a year earlier.
Officials also pointed to a growing pipeline of domestic large language models, with 58 already registered—placing Hangzhou among the top cities nationwide.
Two locally developed models, DeepSeek and Qwen, have gained global traction. Their combined token usage ranks among the highest worldwide on platforms such as OpenRouter, highlighting rising adoption of Chinese-developed AI systems.
Officials said the city is also advancing regulatory frameworks for emerging sectors, including embodied AI and data trading, while aiming to expand global access to domestic models.
“By 2026, the Hangzhou pilot zone aims to generate 30 institutional innovation cases, open more than 200 AI application scenarios, and lift AI core industry revenue across three districts to over 160 billion yuan,” said Wang.
