- Advanced manufacturing spending rises 20% in early 2026.
- AI, robotics and chips anchor city’s next industrial growth phase.
Hangzhou’s push to build a world-class industrial base received a boost at the start of 2026, with investment in advanced manufacturing clusters rising sharply as the city accelerates a sweeping plan to anchor growth in high-tech production.
Investment in advanced manufacturing reached 15.26 billion yuan ($2.21 billion) in January-February, up 20.1% from a year earlier, city officials said at a monthly work meeting reviewing progress on Hangzhou’s “296X” industrial cluster strategy.
What is ‘296X’?
First unveiled in October 2025, the “296X” framework forms the backbone of Hangzhou’s industrial policy. The plan targets two trillion-yuan industries — artificial intelligence and visual intelligence — alongside nine billion-yuan-scale sectors including embodied robotics and smart terminals, semiconductors, biomedicine and medical devices, network communications, intelligent connected vehicles, new-energy equipment, advanced materials, high-end equipment manufacturing, and modern textiles.
Six future industries, ranging from synthetic biology and aerospace to quantum technology and brain-inspired intelligence, are also being incubated, while the “X” category leaves room for emerging sectors born from research labs.
In the January-February period, manufacturing investment accounted for a larger share of total fixed-asset spending, increasing 3.1 percentage points year on year and helping drive overall project investment growth of 10.4%. Total fixed-asset expenditure rose 1%.
Industrial output from companies with annual main business revenue exceeding 20 million yuan reached 187.4 billion yuan in the first two months, up 7.4% over the previous year, a 0.4 percentage point faster than the city’s overall industrial growth rate.
The meeting, chaired by Hangzhou Party Secretary Liu Fei, included progress reports from district-level officials in Xiaoshan, Qiantang, Fuyang and Tonglu, as well as departments overseeing semiconductor, biomedicine, intelligent connected vehicle and advanced materials clusters.
Liu said advancing the “296X” initiative would be central to achieving major breakthroughs during Hangzhou’s 15th Five Year Plan period (2026-2030), stressing a “projects first” approach focused on accelerating construction timelines and bringing key industrial projects into operation sooner.
