China News Service, Changsha, September 24 (Fu Jingyi, Song Ping) The 2026 Hunan Provincial Sensor Industry Development Conference was held in Changsha on the 23rd. Nearly 200 people from the government, universities, enterprises, financial institutions and other sectors participated in the event. It concentrated on displaying the results of Hunan's sensor industry, in-depth docking with all parties involved in industry, academia and research, deepening collaborative innovation, accelerating cluster construction, and promoting the industry towards the goal of 100 billion.
The 2026 Hunan Provincial Sensor Industry Development Conference was held in Changsha. Photo by Fu Jingyi
Sensors are the "features" and "nerves" of machines. Currently, new tracks such as embodied intelligence, quantum technology, and future energy are running parallel, and the demand for smart sensors is booming. Industry estimates indicate that the scale of China's sensor industry will exceed one trillion yuan by 2030. From January to July this year, the output of sensor products of large-scale industrial enterprises in Hunan Province increased by 28.9%.
Yan Yan, a second-level inspector of the Hunan Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology, said that the sensor industry technology iterates quickly and has many subdivided tracks. It is necessary to strengthen collaborative innovation of industry, academia and research, upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, and collaborative innovation of peers, and guide enterprises to promote the transformation of products from "usable" to "easy to use and durable", while strengthening public service platforms and amplifying the cluster agglomeration effect.
Guo Yuansheng, deputy director of the Central Science and Technology Commission of Jiusan Society, said that the current demand for the sensor industry has increased significantly and its scale continues to expand. The era of single discrete devices has ended. Multi-dimensional data description scenarios and functional implementations empowered by AI are promoting the evolution of sensors from single data collection to integrated systems that integrate sensing, local computing and intelligent decision-making.
Han Yun, a senior engineer at the CCID Research Institute of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and deputy secretary-general of the Internet of Things Application Branch of the China Information Industry Chamber of Commerce, pointed out that 70% of China's sensor market currently relies on imports and faces six outstanding problems: "high, small, scattered, abundant, lacking, and difficult." It is recommended that Hunan focus on the three major directions of automobiles, medical care, and industry, form a full-stack service capability for chip materials and devices, use capital to help accelerate the acquisition of high-quality targets, and build a platform to integrate government and corporate resources to create an industrial system.
Jin Xiangliang, a professor at Hunan Normal University, said that the development of smart sensors and related chips in Changsha should adhere to the dual main lines of scene traction, chips as the core, and MEMS + vision. Local scenarios such as engineering machinery, rail transit, and humanoid robots should be used to drive chip iterations, and a closed-loop development system of "research, production, testing, use, and investment" should be established to create a 100-billion-dollar industry chain in five years.
At the meeting, the Hunan Provincial Intelligent Sensor Innovation Center (in preparation) was unveiled. It will lay out centers for pilot verification and concept verification, intelligent sensing science popularization, inspection and certification, chip mass production acceleration, intelligent sensing talent training practice and evaluation, and create an industrial innovation platform that integrates technology research and development, pilot incubation, achievement transformation, and public services. (over)
