Competing for the industry trends, the "city with the largest economy" has taken action.
On August 6th, the General Office of the Shanghai Municipal People's Government released the "Implementation Plan for the Development of Shanghai's Embodied Intelligence Industry" (hereinafter referred to as the "Plan"). The "Plan" proposes that by 2027, there will be no less than 20 breakthroughs in core algorithms and technologies in aspects such as embodied models and embodied corpora; no less than 4 high - quality incubators for embodied intelligence will be built, enabling the agglomeration of a hundred leading enterprises in the industry, the implementation of a hundred innovative application scenarios, and the promotion of a hundred internationally leading products. The scale of Shanghai's core embodied intelligence industry will exceed 50 billion yuan.
To create application demonstration benchmarks, the "Plan" clarifies that based on Shanghai's industrial advantages, it will be led by fields such as logistics assembly, industrial manufacturing, commercial retail, medical and health care, and household services. It will carry out scenario collection and task announcements, explore new business forms of embodied intelligence applications, and provide support of up to 20% of the approved total project investment, with a maximum of 10 million yuan, for industrial innovation and integration demonstration application projects.
As the "city with the largest economy" in China, Shanghai is considered one of the first cities in the country to focus on the field of embodied intelligence. As early as in the "Action Plan for Promoting the High - quality and Innovative Development of Shanghai's Intelligent Robot Industry (2023 - 2025)" issued in 2023, it was proposed to focus on advanced technologies such as embodied intelligence.
At that time, Lu Cewu, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, once said that the development cycle of large models and robot products related to embodied intelligence is relatively long, and government departments need to provide more support and attention to technology R & D investment and development teams in the initial stage. "Making robots everywhere requires a large investment, but as long as the initial stage can be overcome and large - scale production starts, the snowball will keep rolling."
To date, the scale of Shanghai's robot industry accounts for about one - third of the national total; Shanghai is also the first city in the country to include robot density in statistics, and its industrial robot density ranks first in the country. At the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) held in Shanghai, more than 150 humanoid robots were on display together, which was the largest - scale exhibition of humanoid robots in China ever.
Goldman Sachs, an internationally renowned institution, predicts that by 2035, embodied intelligence can replace 25% of manufacturing jobs globally. At the beginning of this year, the State Council included "embodied intelligence" in the government work report, sending a strong signal of vigorously developing future industries. Local governments represented by Beijing and Shenzhen responded first and issued three - year action plans for embodied intelligence.
Shanghai is also making intensive arrangements. In the middle of last month, at a regular meeting of the Shanghai Municipal Government, it was proposed that embodied intelligence is a frontier field where artificial intelligence interacts and integrates with the physical world and is regarded as a key path to break through the bottleneck of AI development. Shanghai should leverage its first - mover advantages in fields such as large models, robots, and computing power infrastructure to promote the development of the embodied intelligence industry.
According to this "Plan", by 2027, Shanghai aims to achieve the "Three Hundreds", namely, the agglomeration of a hundred leading enterprises in the industry, the implementation of a hundred innovative application scenarios, the promotion of a hundred internationally leading products, and the scale of the core industry will exceed 50 billion yuan.
It is understood that currently, Shanghai has developed four basic models such as MiniMax and Jieyue Xingchen, and a total of 82 large models have been filed. With these solid models as the foundation, Shanghai has clearly identified five key directions in the field of embodied intelligence: perception and decision - making models, motion control models, embodied system technologies, embodied corpus technologies, and autonomous operating systems.
Pudong is an area in Shanghai where the agglomeration of embodied intelligent robots is a key layout. Previously, the "16 - point Policy for Supporting the Embodied Intelligence Industry" was released, covering six major directions such as "technological innovation", "application promotion", and "scenario demonstration". In the Moli Community in Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China's first heterogeneous humanoid robot training ground was put into use in January, and it can accommodate more than 100 humanoid robots for simultaneous training in the first phase.
This article is from the WeChat public account "Urban Evolution Theory", author: Yang Huan. Republished by 36Kr with permission.