On October 8, the first working day after the National Day holiday, Guangdong Provincial Party Secretary Huang Kunming visited Shenzhen for research and walked into Tencent's headquarters.

During the discussion session, Tencent Chairman and CEO Ma Huateng spoke, and seated next to him was a young man just 28 years old — Tencent's Chief AI Scientist Yao Shunyu.

Sometimes a single image speaks louder than a thousand words.

The provincial party secretary walked into Tencent's headquarters, and Ma Huateng sat side by side with the group's "AI number one," reflecting the determination of both Guangdong and Tencent to bet on artificial intelligence.

Facing the historic opportunity of artificial intelligence, Guangdong, as China's largest provincial economy, naturally must strive to be at the forefront.

At the 2025 New Year kickoff meeting, Guangdong proposed "making a firm resolution and concentrating efforts in the two major fields of artificial intelligence and robotics."

Today, Guangdong has clearly designated artificial intelligence as a key development area for the "15th Five-Year Plan" and beyond, with a pressing sense of urgency to accelerate AI development.

Guangdong's strong foundation for AI

Guangdong has a solid foundation for laying out AI. In 2025, the province's core AI industry scale exceeded 300 billion yuan, accounting for about one quarter of the national total.

But AI development advances rapidly, and Guangdong hopes to go even further.

As is well known, Guangdong's family wealth is manufacturing.

Now global manufacturing is moving toward intelligence, and Guangdong naturally must upgrade as well, turning its rich manufacturing scenarios into experimental fields for AI implementation, letting AI truly run on production lines to solve problems.

On October 9, Guangdong held a provincial advanced manufacturing conference, which mentioned "vigorously promoting artificial intelligence to empower advanced manufacturing development in an all-round, deep-level, and high-standard manner."

Earlier in April, Guangdong released the "Guangdong Province Action Plan for Accelerating High-Level AI Application Across All Domains, All Times, and All Industries." The name is long, but the core is just one sentence: to let AI empower all industries.

To accomplish this, policy documents alone are not enough — enterprises must carry it forward.

Tencent's high expectations

Among them, Tencent, as an internet giant, is held in high expectations.

Guangdong hopes it will "deeply participate in Guangdong's AI infrastructure construction, continuously increase computing power layout in Guangdong, focus on strengthening general and vertical large models and enhancing application promotion, and help Guangdong accelerate the intelligent development of the entire industrial chain."

Facing the surging AI wave, Tencent aspires to be a trendsetter, but the process has not been smooth sailing.

At the 2026 shareholders' meeting in May, Ma Huateng admitted, "We originally thought we had boarded the ship a year ago, but later found that the ship was leaking. Now we feel we've stood up, but still can't sit down. We still hope the ship can go faster."

Daring to say these words publicly shows Tencent is truly anxious.

More real money pouring into AI

More real money is being poured into AI. In the second quarter of 2026, Tencent's capital expenditure reached 52.8 billion yuan, up 65% quarter-on-quarter and 176% year-on-year, with the money mainly invested in AI computing power, data centers, and other infrastructure.

The key is talent development. Yao Shunyu, born in 1998, graduated from Tsinghua's Yao Class, went to Princeton University in 2019 for his doctorate, and after graduating in 2024 joined OpenAI, participating in the development of projects such as Operator and DeepResearch.

He was recruited by Tencent at the end of 2025 and became "Chief AI Scientist of the CEO/President's Office," while also serving as head of the AI Infra department and the Large Language Model department, responsible for driving AI-related business development.

Coincidentally, when Ma Huateng founded Tencent in 1998, he was exactly 27 years old, and when Yao Shunyu came to Tencent, he was also 27.

Under Yao Shunyu's leadership, Tencent's Hunyuan Hy3 was released, with call volume increasing more than 68 times in the first week.

AI office efficiency service WorkBuddy and AI programming tool CodeBuddy achieved rapid growth.

2026 is seen as a critical year for Tencent's AI to move from the investment phase to commercial transformation.

To complete the transformation, the core path is to embed large models into real scenarios such as factories, supermarkets, and hospitals, turning AI technology into sustainable revenue.

And Guangdong's rich industrial scenarios are precisely the best experimental soil.

Ma Huateng, who is about to turn 55, brought a 28-year-old AI young talent to participate in government-enterprise interaction. The signal conveyed by this image together is already very clear.