A new era of productivity is redrawing the competitive landscape across regions, and future industries have become a decisive lever for urban transformation and economic elevation.

Set for September 23rd to 24th, the 2026 Yuelu Conference will debut a dedicated track for future industries, spotlighting frontiers such as AI plus robotics, AI plus advanced manufacturing, and brain-computer interfaces, while presenting Changsha's progress and breakthroughs in nurturing these sectors.

Building on its strong advanced manufacturing base, Changsha has reinforced technological innovation and refined its industrial ecosystem. Through systematic planning and full-chain cultivation, it is accelerating the shift of future industries from isolated technological wins to clustered, real-world applications, injecting fresh momentum into regional high-quality development.

Strategic Persistence: A Solid Framework for Future Industries

Cultivating future industries carries the traits of long cycles, heavy investment, and cutting-edge technology, putting a city's strategic vision and perseverance to the test.

Changsha has stayed anchored to frontier tracks, maintaining policy consistency and launching multi-dimensional, targeted measures to build a robust institutional foundation for the growth of advanced industries.

With top-level planning taking a long-term view, industrial development is advancing steadily. The municipal Party Congress report laid out the vision to "proactively plan future industries, focusing on brain-computer interfaces, quantum technology, and biomanufacturing," and to "accelerate the cultivation of new economic growth points."

In recent years, Changsha has aligned with the province-wide "AI Plus" initiative, introducing dedicated support policies that form a closed loop of top-level design, detailed implementation, and targeted empowerment. Regular matchmaking between universities, enterprises, and research institutes helps remove barriers in commercialization, supply-demand alignment, and capital connection, fostering a deeply integrated ecosystem of industry, academia, research, and application.

This past June, at the 2026 Changsha Advanced Computing Industry Ecosystem Event, the city unveiled seven outcomes centered on the integration of industrial, supply, innovation, talent, and capital chains, alongside the launch of key industrial projects and bank-enterprise collaborations. This stands as a prime example of how Changsha is smoothing the circulation between industrial and capital chains for future industries, backed by a full-cycle financial support system.

Through its "five-chain integration" mechanism, Changsha is actively linking tech enterprises with capital markets. Lens Technology and Anker Innovations have achieved dual A-share and H-share listings, while CiDi has gone public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with multi-tiered capital empowerment effectively fueling innovation and capacity expansion in future industries.

A favorable business environment serves as fertile ground for industrial clustering. Changsha continues to deepen reforms in administrative services, leveraging the "Chang e Qi" digital platform to deliver direct policy access and closed-loop resolution of corporate requests. Industrial parks are optimizing their services as well: the Yuelu High-tech Zone runs a dedicated intelligent driving commuter line serving over 20,000 employee trips annually, while the Wangcheng Economic Development Zone holds regular government-enterprise dialogues to promptly resolve business challenges.

These continuously upgraded services have kept Changsha among the top ten nationwide for private-sector business climate, creating a stable, transparent, and predictable environment for the clustering of future industries.

Industrial Strength: Mutual Empowerment for Sector Breakthroughs

The future is already arriving. On the production lines of Zoomlion Heavy Industry, wheeled and bipedal humanoid robots have joined the workforce. Emotionally engaging robotic companions are stepping into everyday homes. At Lens Technology's factories, six-axis robots paired with AI vision inspection systems have cut defect misdetection rates from 30% to 2%.

Changsha's future industries are thriving across a wide range of manufacturing scenarios. This rapid rise is the natural outcome of decades spent deepening the real economy and cultivating a strong scientific and technological foundation.

Relying on its solid manufacturing base, mature cluster systems, and abundant innovation resources, Changsha is enabling mutual empowerment and iterative co-evolution between traditional advantage industries and future frontier sectors, building hardcore strength for breakthroughs on new tracks.

Advanced manufacturing provides unrivaled real-world application scenarios for future industries. As a national hub for advanced manufacturing, Changsha hosts three state-level advanced manufacturing clusters and 23 provincial and municipal key industry clusters. Its construction machinery sector has ranked first nationally for 16 consecutive years, with five companies among the global top 50 in the field.

Zoomlion's smart industrial city operates with fully intelligent production, rolling out a piece of smart equipment every six minutes, offering a prime testing ground for AI-empowered industry and the iteration of intelligent robots. Leveraging this advantage, leading enterprises like Zoomlion and Sany Heavy Industry are expanding into embodied intelligence and industrial large models, driving frontier technologies through continuous optimization in real industrial settings, and advancing from traditional manufacturing to future-oriented intelligent production.

Deep scientific accumulation and a top-tier computing infrastructure provide hardcore support for industrial innovation. Changsha is a key birthplace of China's AI industry, with the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence founded here in 1981, and national-level achievements such as the Galaxy-1 and Tianhe-1 supercomputers emerging from the city. It ranks 9th in China's urban innovation capability index and 23rd globally in scientific research city rankings.

With 4,490 R&D institutions and over 400 key core technologies broken through in the past five years, the National Supercomputing Center in Changsha has led globally in computing energy efficiency for three consecutive years. A local AI innovation center has built a 200P domestically-produced computing cluster, and all 11 nationally registered large models in the province are deployed in Changsha. These central-region-leading computing resources consistently safeguard technological breakthroughs and scenario implementation in future industries.

A tiered enterprise echelon reflects vibrant innovation across the board. Changsha has fostered a gradient structure of "leading enterprises guiding, specialized giants supporting, and SMEs filling gaps," with 243 national-level specialized and sophisticated "little giant" enterprises and 42 national manufacturing champions.

Leading companies are breaking new ground: Zoomlion has developed eight embodied intelligent robots, accumulated 180,000 sets of industrial real-world data, and deployed them in production line applications. Lens Technology has entered the humanoid robot sector with an annual production capacity of 500,000 units. In niche segments, Zhongke Huisi is filling gaps in real robot data, while Duzheng Bio has launched China's first AI agent for precision medication. This multi-point innovation landscape is continuously upgrading the quality and efficiency of future industries.

Vast Potential: Evolving Ecosystems for Future Momentum

Standing on a solid foundation while gazing toward the future, Changsha is leveraging ecosystem building, technological breakthroughs, and commercialization empowerment to drive future industries from point breakthroughs to chain-based clustering, and from pilot scenarios to scale.

The industrial cluster ecosystem is improving steadily, with agglomeration effects becoming ever more pronounced. Changsha is advancing "five-chain integration" to unblock bottlenecks and cultivate a diversified innovation ecosystem. The Hunan Xiangjiang New Area hosts 532 AI industry chain enterprises with output exceeding 30 billion yuan, accounting for over 60% of provincial AI demonstration projects.

The Changsha Economic and Technological Development Zone and Yuhua Economic Development Zone are focusing on AI and robotics respectively, forming a complementary and coordinated development pattern. In data empowerment, Changsha's "1+7" citywide layout drives double-digit billion-yuan output, with annotation data scale ranking among the nation's top tier. Having been re-approved as a pilot city for construction machinery data annotation in 2026, the city's vast, high-quality data resources provide a strong foundation for AI industry iteration.

Frontier technologies and application scenarios are achieving dual breakthroughs, with innovation outcomes rapidly landing. In embodied intelligence, Zoomlion globally debuted its Robot Ops embodied intelligence operating system, with self-developed robots applied across nearly 20 scenarios including industrial inspection and intelligent maintenance. In on-device AI, Hui Shiwei's "Juzhou" vision large model delivers high-definition image generation in seconds even offline, setting a new industry record for on-device computing performance.

In the brain-computer interface arena, Consente is advancing core equipment R&D, supplying neural signal collection devices for top-tier brain-computer experiments at Zhejiang University and participating in national-level research. In quantum technology, China's first optical cavity frequency stabilization instrument has been deployed in Changsha, breaking decades of foreign monopoly. Meanwhile, Changsha is fully advancing "vehicle-road-cloud integration" pilot projects and has created 95 provincial-level AI demonstration scenarios for empowering new industrialization, bringing frontier technologies out of the lab, onto production lines, and into everyday life.

Changsha's most distinctive competitive edge lies in its ability to efficiently convert mature manufacturing systems, rich application scenarios, and complete supporting capabilities into advantages for future industries. Building on its construction machinery and advanced computing roots, the city is continuously deepening the integration of traditional manufacturing with artificial intelligence, robotics, and new materials, extending industrial chains, elevating value chains, and perfecting innovation chains.

The 2026 Yuelu Conference will showcase Changsha's achievements in cultivating future industries while providing a vital platform for gathering scientific innovation resources and seizing future tracks. At this new starting point, Changsha will continue to strengthen its future industry clusters and nurture new quality productive forces, striving to become a central-region hub for future industry innovation, writing a new chapter of transformation for this city of mountains and rivers.