(Yicai) July 29 -- Shanghai has brought out a package of measures to hasten the adoption of artificial intelligence technologies and cut innovation and entrepreneurial costs, including CNY10 billion (USD1.4 billion) of subsidies.

The 12 measures were launched at the closing ceremony of the three-day 2025 World AI Conference yesterday. They span the full AI ecosystem from computing power, large language models, and data resources to ecosystem building, talent services, and funding.

The initiative includes CNY6 billion (USD836 million) to bolster the construction of computing power scheduling platforms and provide subsidize rents by up to 30 percent for entities using smart computing power, CNY3 billion for businesses deploying or using third-party LLMs, with grants covering up to half of the cost and limited to CNY5 million per firm, and CNY1 billion to support the procurement of high-quality training datasets.

The policy package also includes plans to build an AI Town -- a high‑density, low‑cost AI industrial cluster -- qualified talent and entrepreneurial teams with lower rents or one-time startup funding ranging from six months to three years. 

It will offer up to 30 percent funding support (capped at CNY50 million per project) for frontier research and development in areas such as foundational AI theory and tools, next‑generation artificial general intelligence, smart chips, embodied intelligence, AI software, brain‑computer interfaces, and intelligent computing systems.

The Shanghai government also launched the AI Corporate Venture Capital fund with CNY3 billion of investment during the WAIC's closing ceremony. It will focus on the three cornerstones of AI models, data corpus, and computing power.

Shanghai was home to 394 big AI companies as of March 31. Their combined first-quarter profits surged 65 percent from a year earlier on a 29 percent jump in revenue to over CNY118 billion (USD16.4 billion), according to data from the local economy and informatization commission. The city's AI talent pool accounted for nearly a third of China's total.

Editor: Martin Kadiev