- Investment in priority sectors rises 15.2% as city doubles down on advanced manufacturing
- AI, chips and high-end equipment lead project pipeline and capital spending
Hangzhou’s flagship “296X” advanced manufacturing initiative outpaced the broader industrial economy in the first four months of the year, as the city ramped up investment in sectors such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors and high-end equipment.
Industrial output from companies within the “296X” clusters rose 7.6% year-on-year between January and April, 1.4 percentage points faster than the city’s overall industrial sector.
The growth helped lift value-added industrial production by 6%, officials said at a municipal manufacturing meeting on May 28.
Rising investment
Investment in the clusters climbed 15.2%, raising manufacturing’s share of fixed-asset investment to 17.2%, up 2.9 percentage points from a year earlier.
The initiative, launched in late 2025, forms the centerpiece of Hangzhou’s effort to build new industrial growth engines.
It focuses on areas including AI, robotics, semiconductors, biopharmaceuticals, intelligent vehicles and advanced equipment manufacturing.
Since the program began, Hangzhou has secured 188 manufacturing projects worth more than 100 million yuan ($14.78 million) each, including 29 projects with investment commitments exceeding 1 billion yuan.
Courting new projects
Project attraction accelerated in the first quarter, when the city landed 114 projects above the 100 million yuan threshold, including 12 worth more than 1 billion yuan. Investment growth in AI, integrated circuits and high-end equipment all exceeded 50%.
Research spending also increased. R&D expenditure at industrial companies within the clusters reached 5.45% of revenue in the first four months of the year, up 0.16 percentage point from a year earlier.
The ratio rose to 5.62% in the first quarter, 0.38 percentage point above the full-year 2025 level.
The ‘296X’ framework
Under the “296X” framework, Hangzhou aims to build two trillion-yuan industrial clusters in AI and visual intelligence, nine industries with output exceeding 100 billion yuan, and six future industries including synthetic biology, aerospace, the low-altitude economy, quantum technology, optoelectronics and brain-inspired intelligence.
At the meeting, Party Secretary Liu Fei called for closer integration of scientific research and industrial development, while officials reviewed plans for the biopharmaceutical and medical-device sector as well as the city’s optoelectronics cluster.
