Qingdao, a coastal city in East China's Shandong province, held the launch ceremony of the Qingdao Artificial Intelligence (AI) Industrial Park in Laoshan district and opened the headquarters of the National Innovation Institute of High-end Smart Appliances on Feb 23, marking a milestone achievement in building more competitive AI industrial clusters.

Approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to construct a national AI innovation and application pilot zone in 2019, Qingdao has boosted the rapid development of AI technology based on diverse application scenarios brought about by its solid foundation in manufacturing. 

A design rendering of the Qingdao Artificial Intelligence Industrial Park [Photo/Qingdao News]

Covering a total area of 2,918 mu (194.6 hectares), the park boasts a spatial layout of "one valley and two wings", with the Qingdao Smart Computing Valley serving as the core and the Haier Science and Technology Innovation Ecosystem Park and the Hisense Global R&D Center as its pillars. 

It has set up four functional zones that specialize in software research and development (R&D), hardware manufacturing, science and technology innovation bases and comprehensive services.

The park has three major goals: Supporting computing power service, becoming a cradle for software and hardware integration and establishing itself as a leader in industrial applications. It also focuses on emerging sectors such as hardware manufacturing, the R&D of complex algorithm software as well as model training and data service and expands application scenarios covering smart homes, industrial intelligence, smart cities, smart finance and life and health.

The Qingdao Artificial Intelligence Computing Center [Photo/Qingdao News]

By 2028, the industrial scale of the Qingdao Smart Computing Valley, the core part of the park, is expected to exceed 60 billion yuan ($8.69 billion). The park also plans to form some 100 application scenarios with distinctive features.

The park is home to two AI computing centers, namely the Qingdao Artificial Intelligence Computing Center, which has a high central processing unit performance equivalent to that of 50,000 personal computers, that are in their first phase and the "Heart of the Sea" Artificial Intelligence Computing center with a computing power of 150P that's in its first phase.

The park boasts high-end AI innovation platforms including the National Innovation Center of High-end Smart Appliances and the Shandong Institutes of Industrial Technology. The former is the only national-level manufacturing innovation center in the field of home appliances, and the latter has built a "government, industry, university, research and financial services" mechanism and incubated 40 scientific and technological innovation enterprises.