Data has become the commanding height of a new round of competition for artificial intelligence (AI) in China, according to an industrial report released on Thursday at the closing ceremony of the 2024 China Internet Conference.

In 2023, the development of China's AI industry ushered in new space and new opportunities. According to the report, as of December 2023, the core industry model had reached 578.4 billion yuan (about $79.7 billion), an increase of 18 percent.

The country has also steadily improved in terms of industrial development and the number of enterprises. As of March 2024, there had been more than 29,770 AI enterprises in the world, and the number of Chinese enterprises had exceeded 4,500, accounting for about 1/7 of the total number of global enterprises, said the report.

China's AI scientific research and innovation ability continues to improve, with the number of papers produced in the field of AI ranking second in the world last year.

From 2013 to September 2023, the cumulative number of AI patent applications in the world exceeded 1.29 million, with China accounting for 64 percent, noted the report.

Since 2023, China's network infrastructure has become increasingly complete, key frontier technologies have been innovated and developed, digitalization in key areas has steadily improved, the construction of a comprehensive network governance framework has accelerated and the cybersecurity industry has developed with high quality.

China's 5G, gigabit optical fiber network and other new information infrastructure construction have increasingly been completed, the users and traffic scale of IPv6 have significantly increased, satellite internet construction has been steadily advancing, and fiber broadband network service capabilities continue to strengthen.

According to the report, the construction of computing infrastructure in China has reached the world's leading level, and the scale of the cloud computing market has grown rapidly.