SHENZHEN — Inside a flagship store of Chinese drone maker DJI in the city of Shenzhen, South China’s Guangdong province, British visitor Annabel Grainger was busy taking photos of products to share with her friends back home.
“My friends won’t have seen anything like this before,” she said.
A thriving tech hub, Shenzhen has emerged as a magnet for global tech aficionados. The city’s wide range of high-tech products, including artificial intelligence glasses, AI 3D printers, AI robots, drones and handheld gimbal cameras, have generated considerable buzz on international social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
An average of nearly 8,000 foreign buyers visit Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen’s mega electronics marketplace, each day. From January through July, sales of AI products in this area surged more than 55 percent from a year earlier. Sales of AI glasses doubled, while sales of drones and robots climbed by 60 to 70 percent during the same period.
Industry insiders noted that a complete industrial chain and high-density industrial clusters have taken shape in Huaqiangbei’s AI sector, covering the full spectrum from AI chip solutions and agent development to on-device model deployment and scenario testing.
These advantages, they said, have facilitated the deep integration of AI technologies into hardware products, while boosting production efficiency and significantly lowering costs.
“It takes several weeks to make a prototype in Europe, but it can be done in half a day in Shenzhen,” Dutch engineer Henk Werner said.
In a bid to incentivize enterprises to double down on fundamental core technologies over the long haul, the city’s Nanshan district, home to a vibrant tech ecosystem, has set up a seed fund and an angel fund totaling 500 million yuan ($74.55 million), aimed at offering lead investment support to early-stage ventures.
Leveraging an international cooperation center based in the city’s Longhua district, a host of advanced technology firms have successfully introduced their AI-powered intelligent computing terminals and other smart products and solutions to markets across North America and Southeast Asia.
Shenzhen has also jointly built cooperation platforms with member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The Shenzhen-Singapore cross-border data verification platform, now in trial operation, is designed to address challenges related to secure data flows in AI and other industries.
XINHUA-CHINA DAILY
