The General Office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has officially released the Artificial Intelligence SME Entrepreneurship Support Plan (2026-2028) today. This three-year initiative is designed to cultivate a substantial number of AI startup enterprises with strong innovation capabilities and significant growth potential across key sectors such as industry applications, data services, and intelligent computing power.
The plan sets ambitious targets, aiming to nurture over 10,000 new technology and innovation-focused small and medium-sized enterprises, while also pushing the number of specialized and sophisticated "little giant" enterprises beyond the 2,000 mark. Furthermore, it anticipates the emergence of numerous gazelle and unicorn companies.
A core focus of the plan is to solidify the supply of accessible computing resources. By leveraging the national computing platform, the initiative seeks to consolidate and flexibly allocate computing resources, providing startups with efficient, cost-effective support. This involves deepening the special action for empowering SMEs with affordable computing, constructing edge computing facilities as needed, and enhancing the integration of computing and network capabilities.
The plan also emphasizes improving the functionality of dedicated channels on the China SME Service Network and the national computing platform's SME sections, ensuring a more effective match between computing supply and the demands of entrepreneurial ventures.
In addition to computing power, the strategy aims to enrich the availability of high-quality data resources. It calls for the implementation of an industrial data foundation action, encouraging industry leaders, platform companies, and industry associations to form data cooperatives with SMEs. These cooperatives will focus on building high-quality datasets in fields like smart manufacturing, materials R&D, and biomedicine, which will be made accessible to AI startups in an orderly manner.
Cultivating data service providers is another key element, with the goal of offering consultancy, governance, and annotation services to lower data procurement costs for AI ventures. The plan also supports pilot cities for SME digital transformation in uncovering more valuable data resources under compliant conditions, thereby boosting the data engineering capabilities of smaller firms.
To broaden the entrepreneurial landscape, the plan encourages local governments to be supportive of "one-person companies" and "super individuals" who engage in agile entrepreneurship through intelligent tools. It also seeks to accelerate the growth of "intelligent-native" enterprises, backing core contributors to open-source communities and agent developers in exploring commercialization paths, while supporting a cadre of high-potential startup newcomers.
The initiative further promotes guiding technology managers in areas like scientific achievement discovery, screening, and commercialization services within the AI field. This is intended to accelerate the business application of industrializable scientific outcomes and back research teams looking to launch ventures based on these achievements.
Finally, the plan outlines steps to advance the open-source startup ecosystem. It supports the growth of the national-level AI open-source community (AtomGit), strengthening the supply of high-quality open-source resources and services for AI startups. AI ventures are also encouraged to participate actively in the open-source ecosystem, contributing models, tools, and datasets to foster a collaborative and mutually beneficial environment.