On July 26, CCTV's "Morning News" program aired a three-episode series titled "Mid-Year Economic Review: New Intelligent Manufacturing," dedicating a nine-minute segment to an in-depth look at Hubei Province. Reporters visited industrial parks and production workshops in Wuhan and Huangshi, observing how digital intelligence is transforming every step of industrial production, from optical communications to specialty steel, and from century-old factories to startups. In the first half of this year, the added value of industries above a designated size in Hubei grew by 8.9% year-on-year, 3.5 percentage points higher than the national average. The growth rate for June alone hit 10.4%, a 52-month high. How is this major industrial province shouldering its responsibilities? How is New Quality Productive Forces being implemented on the ground? Three key words decode the solid foundation of Hubei's "Intelligent Manufacturing Leap."

Key Word 1: Digital Empowerment - From "People Searching for Materials" to "Data Running"

At the FiberHome Telecommunication Technologies Co., Ltd. optical cable digital manufacturing park in Wuhan, Hubei, reporters observed multiple types of communication optical cable products continuously rolling off the production line. Zhang Chenglong, General Manager of the FiberHome Manufacturing Center, stated, "Traditional manufacturing relied entirely on manual material searching, which involved a heavy workload for transportation. Through digital and intelligent transformation, we have achieved data interoperability across the entire production supply chain." By building a "5G + Industrial Internet" platform, the company has equipped the entire process of optical preform manufacturing, fiber drawing, and cable forming with "data eyes." Utilizing operations research optimization algorithms, it achieves intelligent material allocation and flexible order scheduling, reducing the product delivery cycle by 30%. Alongside efficiency gains, intelligent manufacturing is also penetrating core production processes. Recently, FiberHome successfully developed the world's largest optical fiber preform, once again setting an industry record. CCTV reporter Song Wenjin noted, "This is the world's largest optical fiber preform, with a diameter of 0.3 meters and an effective length of 3.5 meters. This single preform can produce 20,000 kilometers of optical fiber." The company's self-developed flame intelligent algorithm can monitor the flame angle, root distance, and color temperature changes during the preform production process in real-time, automatically adjusting process parameters to eliminate potential production anomalies in advance, significantly improving the product yield rate. Xie Kang, General Manager of FiberHome's Wuhan Fiberhome Ruituo Technology Co., Ltd., said, "In the past, we relied on manual inspections to detect anomalies. Through AI recognition, we can identify anomalies in the entire production process more quickly and earlier, thereby improving overall manufacturing efficiency and quality." Currently, the company has established a digital quality control platform covering the entire product lifecycle, maintaining industry-leading yield rates for optical fiber preforms and optical fibers, with orders already booked into next year. Simultaneously, the company is using the entire process data from optical fiber and cable R&D and production for industry-specific large model training, consolidating it into high-quality industry datasets. This provides replicable practical experience for the development of emerging industries like optoelectronics. Wu Ping, General Manager of the Operations Management Department at FiberHome, explained, "We possess the complete set of processes from preform manufacturing to fiber drawing and cable forming, and we have accumulated over 20 years of manufacturing process data. We also have a dedicated big data company and underlying computing power. We can integrate all three to become a solution service provider for intelligent manufacturing in the optical fiber and cable industry."

Key Word 2: AI Renovation - A Century-Old Steel Company Forges a New Path

In Huangshi, Hubei, Daye Special Steel has built the first full-process industrial internet platform in the global steel pipe industry. AI and digital technology are deeply embedded in the production line, driving the continuous advancement of flexible manufacturing capabilities for special seamless steel pipes. At the digital intelligence center of Daye Special Steel's 460 Steel Pipe Plant, tens of thousands of data points refresh on a large screen in real-time. A digital twin system controls the entire production line with millisecond-level precision. Currently, the traditional model of large-scale, standardized production is gradually fading, replaced by customized production featuring multiple varieties, small batches, and high precision. At the 460 Steel Pipe Plant, the production line must complete a process switch every half hour on average, adjusting a full set of production parameters for orders from around the world. Ma Jinhui, Head of the Quality Assurance Department at the Daye Special Steel Co., Ltd. Research Institute, said, "You can see here we have a contract list. In the pending orders, you can see the number of steel pipes. For traditional steel production, if an order is only for a few pipes, organizing production becomes very difficult." To solve this problem, the company invested nearly 1 billion yuan in a full-process digital and intelligent transformation, turning the 460 Steel Pipe Plant into one of the first national-level "Excellent Intelligent Factories" in the domestic special steel industry. By relying on a self-built integrated industrial internet platform, the factory has converted the practical experience accumulated by generations of steel rolling technicians over the decades into automatically executable data and imported it into an AI large model. Previously, a dispatcher would take half a day to compile a weekly production plan; now, the system can generate the optimal plan in minutes, reducing the waiting time for switching between different steel types and specifications by 70%. The digital and intelligent transformation has brought more than just efficiency gains. In the past, after steel pipes were produced, workers had to manually measure them with micrometers and conduct batch sampling, making it difficult to cover all potential defects. Now, from the billet entering the production line to the finished product being stored, each steel pipe leaves behind over 20,000 production data points, effectively creating a unique "digital growth diary" for every piece of steel. Each finished pipe is also marked with an exclusive digital "ID card." Tang Ke, Director of the 460 Steel Pipe Plant, explained, "We now achieve monitoring of every single steel pipe. The system automatically accumulates or collects our optimal parameters and data to standardize the entire process operation and reduce such deviations." In the first quarter of this year, the supply capacity of the company's high-end specialty products continued to rise, with the output of high-grade varieties increasing by 8.5% year-on-year and 370 new specialty steel categories developed. The company has shifted from homogenous competition in ordinary steel to a new track of domestic substitution for high-end specialty steel.

Key Word 3: Ecological Synergy - From "Providing Policies" to "Providing Scenarios"

As the "AI+" action deepens, intelligent manufacturing is not only improving efficiency and quality for local manufacturing enterprises in Hubei but also giving birth to a new track: the industrial intelligent service industry. In Wuhan, Hubei, an industrial intelligent solution service provider's production scheduling center is running a semiconductor industry-specific large model at high speed. The screen displays real-time production line data from nearly a hundred partner manufacturing enterprises inside and outside the province. Relying on a full-chain digital diagnosis and intelligent transformation service, the company's order volume experienced rapid growth in the first half of this year, with output value increasing by over 10% year-on-year. Liu Liang, EAS R&D Director of the Semiconductor Division at GCL Intelligent Technology, noted, "Many factories in the past were weak in automation and intelligence. We are empowering these enterprises. Whether it's consulting solutions or final implementation and delivery, we provide a full-process closed-loop solution to help them improve their industrial capabilities." Earlier this year, the local government issued the "Hubei Province AI + Manufacturing Action Implementation Plan," building a comprehensive policy support system covering aspects like computing power infrastructure, application scenario openness, and high-end talent cultivation. It supports joint research between local AI service companies and manufacturing enterprises, turning production workshops into "testing grounds" and "implementation grounds" for AI technology, allowing the technology to iterate and mature while solving real production problems. Meanwhile, addressing the common dilemma of small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises "not knowing how to transform and fearing to transform," Hubei is building a provincial-level public service platform. By integrating technical resources from universities, research institutes, and AI companies, it is launching lightweight, low-cost intelligent transformation solutions to continuously lower the barriers to enterprise transformation. As future industries like low-altitude economy and humanoid robots accelerate their layout, the local government is also continuously opening channels to connect AI technology with emerging industrial scenarios. Zhou Xiao, Deputy Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Industry Division of the Hubei Provincial Department of Economy and Information Technology, stated, "We are building a provincial-level computing power interconnection and sharing platform, and also building a provincial-level intelligent agent public service platform. This will provide one-stop public services for manufacturing enterprises across the province, from data to algorithms, computing power, models, and intelligent agents. This will provide strong momentum for the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, the growth of emerging industries, and the forward-looking layout of future industries." Looking ahead to the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, Hubei will continue to implement the "AI Scenario Open Action," annually releasing over 100 typical AI application demonstration projects to promote the deep integration of AI technology into thousands of industries, injecting new impetus into the central region's industrial highland.