(Yicai) Feb. 13 -- Shanghai's artificial intelligence ecosystem and professional service capabilities are attracting one-person companies, usually established by so-called "super individuals," to set up operations in the city.

About 100 OPCs settled in Xuhui district within a month after the launch of relevant support policies, Lin Le, deputy director of the district's Science and Technology Commission and its AI task force, told Yicai. Xuhui plans to add 2,500 high-quality super entrepreneur workstations for such companies and build five distinctive and resource-intensive communities in the first half of this year, Lin said.

An OPC is a limited liability company with only one natural person shareholder or one corporate shareholder. The popularization and application of AI agents have significantly lowered the operational threshold for such firms, driving the rapid growth of their numbers.

Lingang Special Area, a key testing ground for economic and trade policies within the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, launched a special action plan designating "zero-lease" startup spaces for OPCs last August. Zhangjiang Science City and Xuhui have also rolled out relevant special support policies.

Shanghai's abundant commercial application scenarios, sufficient data resource supply, and perfect supply chain ecosystem are an irreplaceable attraction for OPCs. Compared with Beijing's advantages in underlying AI model research and development and Shenzhen's strengths in the smart hardware supply chain, the eastern megacity's core edge lies in its complete industrial ecosystem, which features a full supply chain layout from hardware, software, graphics processing units, algorithms, and model training to applications.

"Shanghai has nearly 10 percent of China's computing power, gathers one-third of its AI talents, and operates the country's first public corpus service platform," said Tang Wenkan, director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization. "Good models never lack computing power, good applications never lack corpus, and good products never lack chips in the city."

Targeted financial support and efficient government services have also made entrepreneurs feel at home in Shanghai, Tang noted, adding that the city issued CNY1 billion (USD140 million) of various subsidies over recent years, including computing power, corpus, and model vouchers.

"AI, computing power, and model development investments are huge, and targeted subsidies provided by the government are crucial for us, allowing us to be bold and adopt more aggressive strategies in the early stage of entrepreneurship, including offering free quotas to users," Kong Xiangyu, who recently came to Shanghai with his partner and co-founded AI education product developer Lingohow, told Yicai.

In addition to financial support, the greatest help Shanghai offers is a sense of belonging, Kong said. "Both my partner and I are first-time entrepreneurs, new comers to the city and lack experience in running a company. 

"But in Shanghai, we can not only find business partners but also quickly get in touch with professionals and receive accurate and useful advice when encountering operational difficulties," Kong stressed. "Every step of the process of setting up a firm in the city is patiently guided by government service personnel, with well-formulated policy details, which is extremely important for entrepreneurs."

"As the first student of Shanghai Innovation Institute to secure startup financing, the institute gives us strong support for entrepreneurship," Peng Zimian, founder of Suiyue Intelligent Technology, which aims to help users achieve one-click deployment of open-source projects through intelligent agent technology, said to Yicai.

Shanghai Innovation Institute is a new-type talent training institution jointly established by the Ministry of Education and the local government in July 2024, with the core mission of cultivating AI leading talents and building a world-class AI innovation highland. By the end of last September, it had signed agreements with more than 50 top and unicorn firms and incubated 10 student and faculty startups.

On average more than 320 tech companies were newly registered in Shanghai per day last year, thanks to the city promoting technological innovation and improving support policies for leading tech firms and high-growth enterprises, according to its work report.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev