Shanghai's AI Sector Nabbed Record Investment of USD8.5 Billion Last Year, City Says
Dou Shicong
DATE:  Aug 23 2019
/ SOURCE:  yicai
Shanghai's AI Sector Nabbed Record Investment of USD8.5 Billion Last Year, City Says Shanghai's AI Sector Nabbed Record Investment of USD8.5 Billion Last Year, City Says

(Yicai Global) Aug. 22 -- Shanghai continues to establish itself as a regional center for artificial intelligence. Last year, the city's AI sector landed an all-time high of CNY60 billion (USD8.5 billion) in funding.

Over 1,000 companies work in AI and more than 3,000 firms have related businesses, The Paper reported today, citing a Shanghai government report. Some 100,000 people are involved in the field.

The report was published as Shanghai gear up to welcome global giants in the field to the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which starts on Aug. 29. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, Turing Award winner Raj Reddy, Tom Mitchell, a pioneer in machine learning, and Jurgen Schmidhuber, father of recurrent neural networks, are all on the guest list.

Shanghai leads China in smart driving and robotics, the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization said in the report. It has a complete industry chain for smart chips, sensors, robots, smart hardware, unmanned systems and intelligent software.

Software giant Microsoft Research Asia set up its Shanghai branch in May. Industry leaders such as Amazon, Alibaba Group Holding, Baidu and iFlytek all have AI innovation centers in the metropolis. It is also home to AI unicorns, including SenseTime, Cambricon Technologies and Horizon Robotics.

The city will continue to focus on building a platform to support innovation in AI technology, to tackle key problems in fundamental science, and to strive to have a voice on the world stage in the fields of computer vision, phonetic semantics, unmanned systems and brain-like intelligence, SHEITC said.

Follow Yicai Global on
Keywords:   AI,WAIC,Shanghai