Guangdong accelerates the development of artificial intelligence

On October 8, the first working day after the National Day holiday, Huang Kunming, Secretary of the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee, went to Shenzhen for investigation and walked into Tencent’s headquarters.

During the discussion session, Tencent Chairman and CEO Ma Huateng spoke. Next to him sat a 28-year-old young man, Yao Shunyu, Tencent’s chief AI scientist.

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The Secretary of the Provincial Party Committee walked into Tencent's headquarters, and Ma Huateng sat side by side with the group's "AI No. 1". Behind this is the determination of Guangdong and Tencent to bet on artificial intelligence.

Facing the historic opportunity of artificial intelligence, Guangdong, as the largest economic province in China, will naturally strive to be the first. At the first meeting of the New Year in 2025, Guangdong proposed "to make great determination and concentrate efforts in the two fields of artificial intelligence and robotics."

Nowadays, Guangdong has clearly regarded artificial intelligence as a key development area in the “15th Five-Year Plan” and beyond, and there is a sense of urgency to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence.

Guangdong is confident enough to deploy AI. In 2025, the scale of the province's core artificial intelligence industry will exceed 300 billion yuan, accounting for about a quarter of the country. However, the development of AI is changing with each passing day, and Guangdong hopes to make further progress.

As we all know, Guangdong’s wealth is manufacturing. Now that the global manufacturing industry is moving toward intelligence, Guangdong must also upgrade. It must turn the rich manufacturing scenarios into a test field for AI implementation, so that AI can truly run on the production line to solve problems.

Just on October 9, Guangdong held a province-wide advanced manufacturing conference, which mentioned "vigorously promoting the development of advanced manufacturing with all-round, deep and high-level artificial intelligence."

Earlier in April, Guangdong released the "Guangdong Province Action Plan to Accelerate the High-level Application of Artificial Intelligence in All Domains and All Industries". The name is very long, but in fact the core is just one sentence, which is to enable AI to empower thousands of industries.

To accomplish this, it is not enough to rely on policy documents alone, but must rely on enterprises to implement it.

Among them, Tencent, as an Internet giant, has high hopes. Guangdong hopes that it will "deeply participate in the construction of Guangdong's artificial intelligence infrastructure, continue to increase the deployment of computing power in Guangdong, focus on strengthening general and vertical large-scale models and strengthen application promotion, and help Guangdong accelerate the intelligent development of the entire industry chain."

Facing the surging AI wave, Tencent is determined to be a leader, but the process is not smooth sailing.

At the shareholders' meeting in May 2026, Ma Huateng said frankly, "We thought we were on the boat a year ago, but then we found that the boat was leaking. Now we feel like we are standing on it, but we can't sit down. We still hope the boat can be faster." Dare to say this in public, which shows that Tencent is really anxious.

More real money is thrown at AI. In the second quarter of 2026, Tencent's capital expenditures were 52.8 billion yuan, a 65% month-on-month increase and a year-on-year increase of 176%. The money was mainly invested in infrastructure such as AI computing power and data centers.

The key is talent construction. Yao Shunyu, born in 1998, graduated from the Yao Class of Tsinghua University and went to Princeton University to study for a PhD in 2019. After graduating from the PhD program in 2024, he joined OpenAI and participated in the research and development of Operator, DeepResearch and other projects. He was introduced by Tencent at the end of 2025 and became the "Chief AI Scientist of the CEO/President Office". He also served as the head of the AI ​​Infra Department and the Large Language Model Department, responsible for promoting the development of AI-related businesses.

Coincidentally, Ma Huateng was 27 when he founded Tencent in 1998, and Yao Shunyu was also 27 when he came to Tencent.

Under the leadership of Yao Shunyu, Tencent Hunyuan Hy3 was released, and the number of calls increased by more than 68 times in the first week. AI office efficiency service WorkBuddy and AI programming tool CodeBuddy have achieved rapid growth.

2026 is regarded as a critical year for Tencent AI to move from the investment period to commercial transformation. To complete the transformation, the core path is to embed large models into real scenes such as factories, supermarkets, hospitals, etc., so that AI technology can be transformed into sustainable revenue. Guangdong’s rich industrial scene is the best testing soil.

Ma Huateng, who is about to turn 55, brings a 28-year-old young AI talent to participate in government-enterprise interactions. The signal conveyed by this same frame is already very clear.