China is the first country to surpass 700 million generative AI (AI that creates text, images, video, and other content on demand) users, with a penetration rate above 50% of its population. The figures cover the first half of 2026, published by the Institute of International Policy and Cooperation under China Internet Network Information Center and reported by VnExpress on October 4, 2026.
How Are Chinese Users Actually Using Generative AI?
Image and video generation is the leading use case, ahead of text tasks and workplace productivity tools. According to China Daily, as reported by VnExpress, passing half the population is a milestone showing AI is becoming part of daily life.
- 47.8% use generative AI for image or video processing
- 37.6% use it for text-related tasks
- 32.5% use it to prepare work summaries, meeting minutes, or presentation slides
- Adoption of multi-purpose AI assistants and productivity tools doubled compared to 2025
What Infrastructure Is Driving China’s Generative AI Scale?
China’s AI computing capacity reached 2,185 EFLOPS (exaFLOPS, a unit equal to one quintillion floating-point calculations per second) as of end of June, up 177% year-on-year, according to the same Institute report. In H1 alone, the country brought online its first self-developed AI supercluster of 100,000 accelerator systems, built entirely from domestic chips, storage, networking, and cooling technology.
Over 30% of large manufacturing companies in China are now using AI, with applications spanning R&D, design, production, quality inspection, and equipment maintenance. By end of June, China had established 16 national advanced manufacturing clusters focused on digital industries including integrated circuits and AI.
Which Models and Datasets Power the Ecosystem?
Chinese companies including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI have released multiple open-source products. Six of the top open-source models in global rankings were developed by Chinese research teams, fine-tuned to run on domestically designed chips. The country also built more than 120,000 high-quality datasets by mid-2026, aimed at linking domestic computing power, models, and data into a national AI ecosystem.
In embodied AI (AI models integrated into physical machines such as robots), China recorded over 400 new humanoid robot models, with annual production scale projected to exceed 100,000 units.
How Fast Is Investment Moving?
In H1 2026, China recorded 1,255 AI investment and financing transactions, equivalent to 78% of all AI transactions recorded across the full year 2025. Total transaction value reached approximately 250.14 billion yuan (roughly $37.32 billion USD), equal to 182% of the capital raised in all of 2025, per the Institute report.
According to China Daily, as reported by VnExpress, China has prioritized expanding the AI industry as a strategic goal in recent years, targeting greater domestic computing capacity and reduced dependence on foreign technology while accelerating AI deployment across the broader economy.
What This Means for AI-Search Visibility
Here is the simplest way to frame this: when more than half a country’s population uses generative AI, AI interfaces can become a primary place people look for answers, product recommendations, and brand comparisons. At 700 million users, that is no longer a forecast for China; it is the current baseline.
The infrastructure story makes this more specific for brands. China now has 2,185 EFLOPS of domestic AI compute (up 177% year-on-year), 120,000+ high-quality datasets, and six globally ranked open-source models developed by Chinese research teams and fine-tuned to run on domestically designed chips. In Hingewise’s view, this combination creates an AI search environment that operates on meaningfully different retrieval patterns (the process by which an AI model finds and pulls in relevant information before generating a response) than Western platforms like ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews (Google’s AI-generated answer panels in search results). A brand’s visibility in DeepSeek or Kimi outputs likely depends more on how well it appears in Chinese-language content than on whether it ranks in Google.
The doubling of multi-purpose AI assistant and productivity tool usage versus 2025 is the metric that matters most for visibility strategy. These are the interfaces where product comparisons and recommendations are generated at volume. Whether a brand surfaces in those outputs is a content-structure question, not just an SEO question.
One implication the raw numbers do not surface: as China’s domestically developed open-source models continue to be released globally, the citation and visibility behaviors shaped by China’s domestic ecosystem could start influencing how these models respond even in non-Chinese markets. Brands that treat Chinese AI search as a separate silo may be underestimating how quickly those models cross borders.
Hingewise’s read: the 50% penetration threshold is the inflection point that makes AI-search visibility in China a present operational concern, not a future one.
Before Targeting Chinese AI Search Audiences, Check:
- Whether your brand has structured, Mandarin-language content indexed on major Chinese platforms
- Whether your brand appears in responses from domestically deployed models (DeepSeek, Kimi, and similar)
- Whether your content addresses the top Chinese AI use cases: image/video workflows (47.8%), text tasks (37.6%), and workplace productivity (32.5%)
- Whether your product information is formatted for AI retrieval, not just web crawling
- Whether your visibility strategy accounts for models fine-tuned on domestic Chinese data, not just English-language training sets
The metrics to watch going forward: whether the 50%+ penetration rate continues rising into H2 2026, and whether any of China’s domestically ranked open-source models gain enough global deployment to shift citation patterns in Western AI search platforms.
Source: VnExpress, October 4, 2026, reporting on data published by the Institute of International Policy and Cooperation under China Internet Network Information Center, and citing China Daily.
By Lam Nguyen · Hingewise
This article was drafted with AI assistance from the sources cited above and checked against them before publishing. The "What this means for AI-search visibility" section is Hingewise's editorial analysis, built on the frameworks and positions we use in our GEO work. How we work: Editorial policy.