Widespread competition

So far, Shanghai has built nearly 20 OPC communities. In Lin-gang Special Area alone, 10 such communities will be built in the coming three years, with the special area looking to attract 1,000 teams and 10,000 entrepreneurs over the same period.

The Shanghai municipal government proposed building an OPC innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in its 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–30) guidelines.

In July, the municipal government announced several measures to further broaden the application of AI and boost the development of the city as an AI powerhouse. They include offering 600 million yuan worth of computing vouchers, 300 million yuan of model vouchers, and 100 million yuan of dataset vouchers. In addition, subsidies will be offered to cover up to 30 percent of computing rental costs and up to 50 percent of model application programming interface costs. The city is also building a national computing interconnectivity network with unified standards.

Looking beyond Shanghai, the entire Yangtze River Delta region has been riding the OPC wave.

Suzhou, in neighboring Jiangsu province, announced in November plans to build more than 30 OPC communities, cultivate 1,000 new OPC enterprises, and attract over 10,000 OPC talents by 2028.

In March, an international AI community in Changzhou, Jiangsu, launched a 100 million yuan OPC fund, offering up to 5 million yuan in equity investment for projects that qualify for it.

Jiangsu's capital city, Nanjing, has established a 10 million yuan proof-of-concept pool in one of its OPC communities, offering up to 500,000 yuan to individual early-stage projects and another 200 million yuan via a talent fund.

Shen Hao, chief engineer of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, said local governments have acted quickly, mainly because they want to seize the next "intersection" of the industrial revolution, where rapidly evolving AI agents meet the entrepreneurial rise of the "mental labor" of individual businesses.

Different cities have different advantages.

Shanghai has a multiplicity of scenarios for commercialization, while Hangzhou boasts a solid data reserve thanks to its long history of e-commerce.

Lower level governments, such as districts, should play a bigger role in the development of OPCs as they are even closer to the market. Government bodies can quickly adjust their policies in response to the latest technology upgrades, leading to an exponential influence over industries, Shen said.