On the evening of November 4, CCTV-2, China Media Group's business channel, aired "Decoding Cities: Dongguan, from World Factory to Innovation Hub" on its Economic Half Hour program, taking viewers inside the National AI Application Pilot Base in the Binhaiwan Bay Area and to the working floor of a homegrown AI company.
Inside the base, a startup team works upstairs and the adaptation center sits downstairs. Computing-power scheduling, chip adaptation and product validation—core resources AI firms once had to travel to other cities to secure—are now a few steps away.
Opened at the end of 2025, the base is built around two tracks: AI plus smart terminals and AI plus manufacturing. It has pooled nearly 370 petaflops of domestically developed inference computing power and set up capability centers for chip application development, Ascend ecosystem adaptation and OpenHarmony adaptation. To date, it has served 312 companies and moved 26 AI terminal projects into adaptation and pilot-scale validation.
What the layout changes is the route a startup takes from idea to market. Backed by Dongguan's complete industrial and manufacturing chains, a team in Binhaiwan can sharpen and validate its AI solution on site. Through the base's pilot testing and adaptation system, proven technology then travels from the application floor to the production line, and on to a far larger market.
Author | Li Jingru
Photos | Nanfang Plus
