Shanghai Gears Up for World AI Conference 2026: “AI Partnership for a Brighter Future”
Shanghai is preparing for its flagship AI moment of the year: the World AI Conference 2026 (WAIC), taking place Friday through Monday under the theme “AI Partnership for a Brighter Future.” The event will bring together more than 1,400 guests and offer over 140 forums across six activity tracks.
World AI Conference: a dense, international program
WAIC 2026 is organized around six pillars — conferences and forums, exhibitions and showcases, awards and competitions, applied experiences, innovation incubation, and talent attraction — and will take place across multiple Shanghai sites, including Pudong, Zhangjiang and Xuhui. Programming includes the main forum, a series of thematic sub-forums, and large-scale exhibitions dedicated to IoT, AI for culture and entertainment, and cutting-edge products.
A record exhibition and global product launches
For the first time, exhibition space will exceed 100,000 m². Organizers expect more than 1,100 companies to attend and announce over 3,000 products and technologies on display, with upwards of 300 world debuts. Highlighted launches include new offerings from Huawei — the AI Atlas 950 computing system and the MiniMax M3 multimodal foundation model — as well as what’s billed as the world’s first agentive smartphone, humanoid robots and highly dexterous robotic hands.
Shanghai as a strategic hub and investment engine
The conference reflects Shanghai’s broader push to back AI through major funding and industrial policy. The city hosts a national AI industry fund of 60 billion yuan supplemented by an additional 22.5 billion-yuan fund. In 2025 Shanghai counted 394 major AI companies with combined industrial revenue exceeding 637 billion yuan (about $93.7 billion), up 39.5% year on year. The smart terminal sector — notably AI-enabled glasses and smartphones — is projected to surpass 300 billion yuan by 2027.
An ecosystem of talent and open source
Shanghai also touts deep human and academic resources: 14 universities have dedicated AI research institutes, 19 offer AI-related majors, and the city is home to nearly 300,000 AI professionals — roughly one third of the nation’s talent pool. On the open-source front, more than 150,000 models are aggregated in the city’s ecosystem, drawing over 10 million developers worldwide.
Looking ahead
World AI Conference 2026 is shaping up to be a major global gathering that underscores Shanghai’s ambition to lead in AI research, productization, investment and talent development. Expect high-profile product debuts, cross-border collaboration and a clear signal of the city’s role as a strategic AI hub.
