Guangzhou's digital economy core industry value expected to exceed 500 bln yuan in 2026

(ECNS) -- The value added by Guangzhou's core digital economy industries is expected to exceed 500 billion yuan (about $69.6 billion) in 2026, according to the Blue Book of Guangzhou's Digital Economy Development (2026), jointly released by the Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences and the Social Sciences Academic Press on Monday.

Since the start of the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), the value added by Guangzhou's core digital economy industries has grown at an average annual rate of over 10%, rising from 12.1% of the city's GDP in 2020 to 15% in 2025, contributing more than 60% to the city's economic growth.

The blue book noted that Guangzhou's computing infrastructure ranks among the top tier nationally. The city has built a comprehensive computing system integrating general, intelligent and supercomputing capabilities. By June 2025, Guangzhou had established general computing capacity of 31,000 Pflops (petaflops, or quadrillion floating-point operations per second), intelligent computing capacity of over 10,000 Pflops, and supercomputing capacity of 145 Pflops.

Guangzhou has also built a solid artificial intelligence industrial chain, supported by foundational hardware and software, with technology R&D at its core and industrial applications as its driver. By September 2025, the city was home to about 2,200 AI-related enterprises.

The blue book projects that Guangzhou's digital economy will maintain strong growth momentum in 2026. By 2030, the city is expected to cultivate several billion-yuan-level intelligent industry clusters and become a nationally influential hub for intelligent economy development.

To accelerate this transition, the blue book recommends that Guangzhou build an intelligent economy system centered on the "data-model-agent-intelligent terminal" framework, with targeted breakthroughs in data industries at the foundational level, model and agent industries at the technology level, and embodied intelligence-led intelligent terminal industries at the application level.

(By Tang Yuxian)