/PRZWT/On September 18th, during Huawei Connect 2025, the AI City Summit with the theme of "Jointly Building the Cloud Foundation of the Intelligent World and Accelerating the Intelligent Upgrade of Government Affairs and Industries" was grandly held. This summit focuses on three major areas: urban "intelligent" governance, smart government affairs, and the digital and intelligent upgrade of industries. It brings together industry experts, government representatives, and ecosystem partners. From the interpretation of policy trends to the sharing of domestic and international practical experiences in AI CITY government services, urban governance, and industrial development, as well as the release of domestic typical cases, it jointly explores the rapid evolution trend of artificial intelligence technology. How to drive the systematic innovation of "AI CITY" and empower the construction of smart cities to enter a new stage of digital and intelligent transformation.
At present, with the continuous improvement of computing power infrastructure performance and the constant breakthroughs in technologies such as deep model thinking and multi-modal fusion, the application scenarios and value of artificial intelligence are undergoing a qualitative transformation from quantitative change. In particular, the explosive growth of AI reasoning capabilities has enabled artificial intelligence technology to reshape the global urban governance and development paradigm at an unprecedented speed, becoming the core engine driving the upgrade of smart cities. Cao Jibin, senior vice president of Huawei and president of the China Region, said in his speech that China's smart city construction has entered a new stage of all-round intelligent transformation. Artificial intelligence has gone beyond the scope of traditional technical tools and has become the core driving force for urban development. Huawei Cloud AI CITY is precisely based on the latest artificial intelligence technologies, promoting the construction of computing power infrastructure in a coordinated manner, uniformly building a common capability platform, deepening the supply of elements such as data, knowledge, high-quality datasets, and talents, and promoting the in-depth integration of artificial intelligence technological innovation with urban modernization and industrial modernization Achieve an overall and systematic leap in the comprehensive strength of artificial intelligence in cities.
AI CITY "1234MNX" : Addressing the pain points of digital and intelligent city construction, promoting the transformation and upgrading of urban governance and industries
Unlike the traditional smart cities driven by data intelligence in the past, AI CITY is driven by "model + knowledge" intelligence, opening up a new future for cities. Cao Jibin pointed out that the transition from traditional smart cities to AI cities is not merely a technological upgrade, but rather a leap in the urban governance system and governance capacity, facing numerous challenges. For instance, for the government affairs end, there are obstacles in the collaborative mechanism behind data silos, insufficient adaptation of AI scenarios, and information security challenges. For the industrial sector, the lack of inclusive computing power and industry models has restricted the intelligent upgrade of the industrial field. For the scientific research end, the fragmentation of data and computing power resources, as well as the limitations of the traditional R&D model, mean that there is still a long way to go for AI systems to empower basic research to achieve a leap from single-point breakthroughs to system support.
For this reason, in June this year, the National Information Center and Huawei Cloud jointly released the "Research Report on the Development of AI CITY", proposing the "1234MNX" reference architecture for AI CITY - which is also the pilot version of AI CITY that can be implemented at this stage. It precisely solves the above problems and provides a systematic implementation reference for the development of artificial intelligence strategies and practices in cities.
Cao Jibin introduced that the "1234MNX" architecture of AI CITY is: "1" intelligent cloud base, which solves the uneven supply of computing power through the computing power inclusive model. The "2" major guarantee system, namely AI security and AI operation and maintenance, addresses the challenges of model security and system stability. Three sets of AI engineering platforms, namely data, model, and native application platforms, connect the development chain from data to applications. "4" type operations, including computing power, models, data, and industrial ecosystems, achieve efficient resource flow. "M" type data and "N" type model assets, breaking the fragmentation of elements; There are "X" innovative applications, covering all scenarios of government affairs, industry and people's livelihood. Currently, this architecture has begun to demonstrate its value in practice: in the field of government services, it has joined hands with Shenzhen to promote the intelligent upgrade of Shenzhen Xiaoi, with 70 AI digital intelligence employees covering 240 scenarios and providing over 150,000 services daily. In the field of urban governance, Baiyun District of Guangzhou has established a "1+4+N" smart urban management system, promoting a "revolutionary reshaping" of multiple urban management scenarios. In the field of industrial empowerment, the new industrialization platform in Huadu District, Guangzhou, has helped enterprises reduce their R&D cycle from several months to just a few days and increase product design efficiency by 50%. The Dongguan Artificial Intelligence Large Model Center helps manufacturing enterprises increase the accuracy rate of production line inspection to 99%.
Regarding the future prospects of Huawei Cloud AI CITY, Cao Jibin put forward three initiatives: He hopes to join hands with more research institutes and government and enterprise customers to continuously innovate and create pioneering cases for the intelligent upgrade of urban government affairs and industries. Invite all partners to join the AI CITY Industry Joint Innovation Program, jointly enrich the application scenarios of the model in the construction and operation, and promote the intelligent transformation of the entire city. At the same time, we should strengthen the cultivation of AI talents to lay a solid talent foundation for the long-term development of the industry.
Build a solid computing power foundation to empower the AI CITY model ecosystem and scene innovation
At the meeting, Wang Feng, President of Huawei Cloud Industry Development, delivered a keynote speech titled "Jointly Building the Cloud Foundation of the Intelligent World and Jointly Initiating the New Future of AI CITY". He said that in future cities, all decisions can be calculated, all applications can be modeled, and all objects can be connected. The future is an era of full digitalization. In April this year, Huawei Cloud released the CloudMatrix384 super node. In June, at the Huawei Developer Conference 2025, the new generation of Ascend AI Cloud services based on the CloudMatrix384 super node was fully launched, providing powerful computing power for large model applications. Pangu Large Model 5.5 has been officially released, with comprehensive upgrades to its five fundamental models: natural language Processing (NLP), computer vision (CV), multimodal, prediction, and scientific computing. The CloudRobo embodied intelligence platform and the ModelArts Versatile enterprise Agent platform were also released. From "One CITY, One Cloud" in 2021 to "One CITY, One Cloud, One Model" in 2024 and then to this year's "AI CITY", Huawei Cloud has always been focusing on industry trends and systematic technological innovation in artificial intelligence, constantly upgrading the reference architecture and development concepts of city cloud, building a solid computing power foundation, and empowering the innovation of AI CITY scenarios and the creation of model ecosystems Build a second choice, or even a better one, for the world.
Wang Feng introduced the five major advantages that artificial intelligence brings to the digital and intelligent development of the entire urban area: New intelligent terminals, through the powerful computing and AI capabilities on the city cloud, empower intelligent terminals to achieve full-scene intelligence in the city; The new computing power infrastructure will move towards a distributed model where "East Data West Computing nodes are given priority adoption" and "local computing power in cities is deployed as needed". The new data infrastructure, oriented towards urban AI application scenarios, has evolved into a data + knowledge-centered data foundation serving large AI models, providing high-quality datasets for the training and fine-tuning of large models. For new AI large models, such as urban large models with more complex scenarios and demands, it is necessary to integrate multiple combinations of third-party commercial models like Pangu Large Model and DeepSeek to form industry advantages. New ecosystem enterprises, based on the urban AI large model center, develop local urban AI application ecosystems, industrial ecosystems, and local professional talent cultivation, etc., to build regional influence in AI.
Artificial intelligence and urban development have a mutually reinforcing effect. Cities are important carriers for achieving an overall and systematic leap in artificial intelligence in China. Artificial intelligence promotes a comprehensive transformation and improvement in urban production methods, lifestyles, and governance approaches. Wang Feng shared with the audience on site the joint innovation practices of Huawei Cloud based on AI in various fields from three aspects: urban governance, people's livelihood and well-being, and industrial development. Shanghai Data Group has built a data element circulation platform, enabling over 3,000 public data items to be circulated in a "trustworthy, controllable and verifiable" manner, empowering more than 30 financial institutions. Guangzhou Baiyun has created a digital human for urban management named "Xiao Yun" based on the Pangu NLP large model, reducing the response time for data query and policy Q&A to 10 seconds. Yixing, Jiangsu Province, has launched a large urban safety model called "Tianji Jing", which is applied to seven urban safety scenarios including urban flooding, water supply pipe burst and gas explosion. In the manufacturing sector, Huadu District of Guangzhou City has pioneered a new model of digital "community canteens", launched 40 industrial Internet SaaS and industrial AI applications, and connected with over 1,200 enterprises. In the field of culture and tourism, Guizhou Culture and Tourism has developed a tourism assistant - Huang Xiaoxi, which can provide itinerary planning and precise cost estimation based on tourists' personalized needs, greatly enhancing the tourists' experience.
Finally, Wang Feng stated that in the AI era, the creation of an urban application ecosystem requires "root technologies". Only with deep roots can it help cities build a diverse and open AI ecosystem. Currently, Huawei is building an open and shared computing power system and an independently innovative software ecosystem based on "root technologies" such as Kunpeng, Ascend, and Gaussian databases. Huawei Cloud shares global ecosystem capabilities with the entire city, driving outstanding global enterprises to integrate into the city's AI ecosystem and supporting the operation planning and execution of AI cities. At the same time, it also provides talent cultivation empowerment services to cities, opens over 2,000 online courses on Huawei Cloud Academy, and has trained a total of 147,000 college students and over 2 million developers. In the future, Huawei Cloud hopes to join hands with governments at all levels and enterprises to accelerate the digital and intelligent transformation, jointly build the cloud foundation of the intelligent world, and jointly usher in a new future of AI CITY.
