China’s generative AI users top 700 million, passing half its population

The China Internet Network Information Centre put China’s generative AI user base above 700 million at the end of June in figures released on 29 September, the South China Morning Post reported. That takes usage past half the population, up from 602 million users and a penetration rate of 42.8 per cent at the end of 2025.

Answers lead generative AI use in China

The increase from the end of 2025 amounts to 16 per cent. The new threshold is significant: a technology counted in the hundreds of millions of users six months earlier now reaches a majority of China’s population.

Seeking answers was the most common use in a survey of generative AI users, chosen by 76 per cent of respondents, the South China Morning Post reported. Image or video processing followed at 48 per cent, with 38 per cent using the tools for text processing.

Another 33 per cent used them for work summaries, meeting notes or presentations. Those responses describe a range of tasks, from everyday questions to office work, rather than a single type of application.

Generative AI use also extends to hardware purchases. China Daily reported that the centre’s figures put the share of Chinese internet users who bought smart hardware online in the preceding six months at 38.7 per cent, including 20.2 per cent who bought wearables.

China’s AI computing capacity reaches 2,185 eflops

China’s intelligent computing capacity reached 2,185 eflops by the end of June, a rise of 177 per cent from a year earlier, the South China Morning Post reported. Eflops measures computing speed in exa floating-point operations per second.

The figures cover more than consumer use. China Daily reported that the centre’s report put AI use at more than 30 per cent of large manufacturing companies, across work including design, production, quality inspection and equipment maintenance.

Chinese developers including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI have also released trillion-parameter open-weight models in 2026, according to the centre’s report as described by the South China Morning Post. Those releases sit alongside the growth in users and computing capacity, though each figure measures a different part of China’s AI activity.

China counts 10,740 AI-related companies

The figures were released by the centre’s policy and international cooperation institute at the seventh China Internet Infrastructure Resources Conference on 29 September, The Straits Times reported. By June, China had 10,740 companies working in fields including large AI models, agents and robotics.

Those companies were concentrated in Beijing and Shanghai, as well as Guangdong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. The same report put year-on-year growth in the use of AI assistants and office productivity tools at more than 100 per cent.

Investment activity grew too. China recorded 1,255 AI-related investment and financing transactions in the first half of 2026, worth about 250.14 billion yuan ($37.32 billion) — 182 per cent of the amount raised throughout 2025, China Daily reported.