context: The 15th 5-year plan calls for comprehensive implementation of the AI+ initiative across technology, industry, culture, public welfare and governance. The State Council’s AI+ initiative sets broad priorities across scitech, industry, consumption and public welfare. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s plan converts that umbrella agenda into sector targets, funding channels and technical workstreams. It casts telecoms and computing networks as both an AI application and the infrastructure needed to spread AI, while using faster long-distance links to tackle the latency problem constraining ‘east data, west computing’.
MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology) issued 'Implementation opinions on the innovative development of AI+ information and communications (2026–28)' on 12 June, setting targets and three initiatives to make telecoms networks users and suppliers of AI.
By 2028, MIIT aims to
- bring intelligent network operations and services to an internationally advanced level and initially achieve high-level network autonomy
- build over 30 high-value scenarios, alongside model applications and specialised agents
- extend metropolitan 1 ms computing-access zones to at least 75 percent of urban areas
By 2030, MIIT targets major breakthroughs in core integration technologies and stronger combined communications, sensing, computing and intelligence services.
The plan frames integration in three ways
- applying AI across network planning, building, maintenance, optimisation and operations, including fault prediction, energy saving and customer service
- supporting AI through communications and computing infrastructure; the PRC has 5.009 million 5G base stations, commercial 400 Gbps long-distance transmission and 1,882 EFLOPS of FP16 intelligent computing capacity
- integrating AI with 5G and optical networks to unlock data for uses including machine-vision inspection and precision equipment control
Its three initiatives cover
- network autonomous-intelligence capability
- intelligent-computing network technology and industrial capability
- R&D and testing for high-speed optoelectronic, forwarding and switching chips, all-optical switching and co-packaged optics
- hybrid optical-electrical networking trials and optoelectronic links for intelligent-computing supernodes
- intelligent-computing service capability
- model-application platforms combining computing power + data + models + AI applications
- full-process environments spanning model training, scenario testing and commercial deployment to speed domestic AI uptake in key industries
MIIT will integrate AI with 5G-Advanced/6G, next-generation optical networks, IPv6+ and the industrial internet. Priority technologies include intelligent mobile air interfaces, highly autonomous networks, native network intelligence, space-based computing networks and the Internet of Agents.
Edge inference deployed across communications networks will support integrated communications, sensing, computing and intelligence services for transport, the low-altitude economy, manufacturing and entertainment. Cloud-network-edge-device inference should cut latency and terminal computing needs while enabling large-small model collaboration.
Pan Helin 盘和林 MIIT Information and Communications Economy Expert Committee member tells National Business Daily that weak heterogeneous-computing coordination, absent scheduling protocols, difficult network-intelligence engineering and privacy–energy trade-offs remain key bottlenecks. He expects deployment to scale first in industrial-internet ‘lights-out factories’, followed by AI-native devices and embodied intelligence. Operators could gain revenue from integrated network, model and computing services, while equipment makers benefit from hardware upgrades.
Network upgrades could also let eastern applications use real-time western computing resources, Pan argues, advancing ‘east data, west computing’ while splitting high-value scenarios in the east from energy and land supply in the west. The official interpretation announces international cooperation on technologies, standards, applications and security.