China data industry surges as AI demand accelerates

China's data industry reached 6.78 trillion yuan in 2025, marking a 15.7 per cent annual growth rate. The surge was primarily driven by artificial intelligence, which increased demand for specialized datasets, software, and data-processing services. At the 2026 China International Big Data Industry Expo in Guiyang, officials reported that data-related software products and data-resource products comprising token services generated 4.99 trillion yuan collectively. This accounted for 73.6 per cent of the industry's total output.

The number of data enterprises across China surged to 482,000 by the end of 2025, a 17.9 per cent increase from the previous year. The eastern regions continued to dominate the sector, contributing approximately 5.23 trillion yuan to the data industry. This growth trend has accelerated over the past three years, with China's data industry value climbing from 5.06 trillion yuan in 2023 to 6.7 trillion yuan in 2025.

The focus of China's data industry has shifted from basic data collection and processing to higher-value services tailored for AI models, intelligent agents, and industry-specific applications. High-quality datasets have become particularly crucial, with over 126,000 such datasets established nationwide as of August 2026. These datasets contain more than 1,815 petabytes of data, a 89 per cent increase since March 2026, reflecting the growing demand from AI developers.

China generated 52.26 zettabytes of data in 2025, a 27.28 per cent increase from the previous year, representing roughly 27.4 per cent of global data production. Enterprises were responsible for approximately nine-tenths of this growth, with manufacturing, transport and logistics, software, and information technology services experiencing strong gains.

The expansion in data production coincides with rapid AI growth, as China's core AI industry surpassed 1.2 trillion yuan in 2025, with over 6,200 specialized AI enterprises operating nationwide.

By the end of 2025, more than 30 per cent of large manufacturing enterprises had adopted AI technologies. This increase in AI adoption is reshaping the data market, with large language models now relying more on proprietary industrial, scientific, financial, medical, and operational data. The demand for video, three-dimensional information, sensor readings, physical interaction records, and synthetic data is also rising due to the emergence of intelligent agents and embodied AI.

The government has acknowledged the potential of China's vast data resources and launched a national program to turn them into commercially usable AI assets. The program aims to expand dataset supply, enhance annotation and quality assessment, encourage controlled circulation, and link dataset development more closely with practical AI applications.

Authorities set targets to achieve significant progress by the end of 2028, including the testing of industry datasets through real-world applications and the establishment of specialized companies capable of developing tools and standards around them.