Help build the "third pole", and the "first provincial capital" speeds up again.

On April 2nd, the Guangzhou Development and Reform Commission issued an announcement to solicit public opinions on the "15th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Modern Infrastructure in Guangzhou (Draft for Comment)". It mentioned strengthening the construction of high-quality data sets. Relying on the "Guangzhou-style Data Factory", a number of multi-modal high-quality data sets will be created around key areas of the modern industrial system. Vigorously cultivate the new business form of data annotation and strive to create a national pilot base for data annotation.

Promote the cultivation action of a hundred models and a thousand products, deepen the construction of large model incubation and cultivation platforms such as "Pazhou Model Square", and cultivate an independently controllable AI model system of "full modality, full size, and all domestic products". Accelerate the construction of the national pilot test base for AI industry applications, and support Haizhu to build the first domestic demonstration area for the application of large AI models. Speed up the construction of major projects such as Yuexin and Zengxin, and build the core bearing area of the "third pole" of the national integrated circuit industry development.

As the largest information industry province in China, Guangdong has the largest domestic market for semiconductor and integrated circuit applications in the fields of consumer electronics, communication equipment, artificial intelligence, and automotive electronics. The import volume of integrated circuits has accounted for 40% of the national total for many years.

Although it has a wide terminal market for chips, the lack of chip manufacturing factories and the extremely unbalanced supply and demand of wafers have once become the shortcoming of Guangdong. In 2021, Guangdong proposed to build the "third pole" of China's integrated circuit industry, and Guangzhou was identified as one of the core bearing areas.

The following year, the "Action Plan for the Development of the Semiconductor and Integrated Circuit Industry in Guangzhou (2022 - 2024)" was released, clarifying that by 2024, the annual main business income of Guangzhou's semiconductor and integrated circuit industry should exceed 50 billion yuan, with an average annual growth target of more than 15%.

For Guangzhou, this is not only a required action to complete the provincial deployment, but also a major means for its own industrial transformation and upgrading. In recent years, under the pressure of the transformation of traditional fuel vehicles, Guangzhou's industrial growth has been under pressure. In 2025, the added value of industrial enterprises above designated size in Guangzhou only increased by 1.3% year-on-year. As the core of strategic emerging industries, the chip industry has become the key to breaking through the bottleneck of industrial transformation.

In the national semiconductor industry pattern, what level is Guangzhou at? According to the "White Paper on the Top 100 Cities with Comprehensive Competitiveness in the Global Integrated Circuit Industry in 2025" of the World Integrated Circuit Association, the top ten cities in the ranking of the top 100 cities with comprehensive competitiveness in the integrated circuit industry in mainland China are Shanghai, Beijing, Wuxi, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, Nanjing, Hefei, and Hangzhou, and Guangzhou is not on the list.

In the local view, although Guangzhou's semiconductor industry is booming, it still has to overcome several hurdles to truly achieve a "big explosion". The "Plan for Accelerating the Construction of a Strong City in Advanced Manufacturing in Guangzhou (2024 - 2035)" released at the beginning of this year proposed to accelerate the development of the semiconductor and integrated circuit industry and actively plan the layout of the entire industrial chain including chip R & D and design, wafer manufacturing, packaging and testing, semiconductor materials, and equipment.

As the "chain leader", Yuexin is an important means. As early as 2019, Yuexin's first 12-inch wafer production line was put into operation, becoming the first 12-inch wafer manufacturing platform in Guangdong to achieve mass production. Subsequently, the first, second, and third-phase production lines of Yuexin were successively put into operation, with a total investment of more than 30 billion yuan and a total production capacity of nearly 90,000 pieces per month. By itself, Yuexin has revitalized Guangzhou's semiconductor industrial chain, and nearly 150 upstream and downstream enterprises have gathered in Guangzhou.

In January this year, the fourth-phase project of Yuexin Semiconductor was launched, with a total investment of up to 25.2 billion yuan. It is planned to build a 12-inch digital-analog hybrid special process production line with a monthly production capacity of 40,000 pieces, which is expected to be completed and put into operation by the end of 2029. On the day of the project launch event, Feng Zhonghua, Secretary of the Guangzhou Municipal Party Committee, and Sun Zhiyang, Deputy Secretary of the Municipal Party Committee and Mayor of Guangzhou, attended and required giving full play to the leading role of leading enterprises to further promote the strengthening and supplementation of the integrated circuit industrial chain and the cluster development.

Data shows that in the first two months of this year, the added value of Guangzhou's integrated circuit and optoelectronic device manufacturing industries increased by 1.2 times and 15.7% respectively. In the local view, in the past few years, the semiconductor projects such as Yuexin and Zengxin deployed in Guangzhou have begun to enter the capacity release period, and the breakthroughs in the upstream of the industrial chain are being transmitted downstream.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Urban Evolution Theory", author: Yang Huan. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.