Shanghai: When Ordinary AI Is No Longer Enough for Global Dominance

While the rest of the world argues about whether ChatGPT will replace programmers, Shanghai has decided to play big. At the opening of the fourth session of the 16th Municipal People's Congress, Mayor Gong Zheng presented not just a progress report but a genuine manifesto of technological expansion. If you thought China was slowing down, the news from Shanghai suggests the opposite: the city intends to become a global epicenter of what it calls a "modern industrial system". This is not about neural networks writing poems. It is about the real economy, which will now run on steroids made of algorithms and satellite connectivity.

Context matters more than the figures here. Shanghai outgrew its status as a mere financial hub long ago. Facing constant pressure from the West and restrictions on chip exports, China's leadership is betting on vertical integration. When the mayor talks about supporting integrated circuits and biopharmaceuticals, he means building supply chains that cannot be cut from outside.

But the most interesting part lies in the new terms now officially written into this year's development plans. Shanghai is heading toward the "low-altitude economy" and satellite internet.

What is the low-altitude economy? Picture the sky over a megacity filled not only with smog but with thousands of autonomous drones and air taxis. It is a huge market for logistics and passenger transport, and it requires not only the aircraft themselves but also a highly sophisticated AI-based air traffic management system. Shanghai plans to become the first city where the concept of a "smart sky" is an everyday reality.

At the same time, the city is investing in satellite internet, clearly trying to create a viable alternative to Starlink. This is critical for controlling those same drones and for providing connectivity anywhere in the ocean, which brings us smoothly to another priority: the maritime economy.

Interestingly, the authorities have not forgotten the "old guard". Instead of simply shutting down factories, Shanghai plans to introduce digital intelligent technologies into steel and petrochemical production. It is an attempt to make traditional industry "green" and efficient through deep automation. In effect, the city is building a giant neural network in which factories, cars, satellites and ships are linked in a single digital loop. Artificial intelligence acts here not as a standalone product but as glue binding all these industries into one organism.

Particular attention goes to intelligent connected new-energy vehicles. Shanghai already hosts the largest electric car plants, but the task is now broader: make them fully autonomous and integrated into the city's infrastructure. This means that in the coming years we will see mass deployment of V2X technologies (vehicle-to-everything communication), in which a car talks to traffic lights, other cars and even the road surface in real time. This requires enormous computing power, which the city also plans to expand by building specialized digital industry clusters.

The key point: Shanghai has stopped playing catch-up and started building the infrastructure of the future, which the West so far discusses only in theory. Can the city digest such ambitions amid a global economic cooldown?