Science
How Shenzhen can win the ‘AI for science’ race
Key Points
How Shenzhen can win the ‘AI for science’ race Rather than copy the research-focused models of Beijing and Shanghai, the tech hub must leverage its industrial depths to become a premier lab for experimentation and deployment The opportunity is obvious: AI could become a new source of scientific productivity and industrial growth. The trap is copying what other cities are doing.
How Shenzhen can win the ‘AI for science’ race
Rather than copy the research-focused models of Beijing and Shanghai, the tech hub must leverage its industrial depths to become a premier lab for experimentation and deployment
The opportunity is obvious: AI could become a new source of scientific productivity and industrial growth. The trap is copying what other cities are doing. Shenzhen should not try to become Beijing with more hardware, or Shanghai with a different set of industry labels; it should build around its own comparative advantage.
The first advantage is the structure of its innovation economy. Shenzhen invested 245.31 billion yuan in research and development in 2024, the highest R&D intensity among Chinese cities. Strikingly, companies accounted for over 93 per cent of that spending. Those figures describe a city where research, engineering and commercial deployment sit unusually close together. This matters in the AI-for-science drive because the hard part isn’t only inventing an algorithm, but turning it into a reliable scientific tool.