An industrial robot performs inspection-related handling work at a factory in Yueqing county-level city, Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, on Sept 8, 2026. [Photo/IC]

A conference on private-sector innovation and development was held in Wenzhou from Sept 8 to 9, highlighting Zhejiang's efforts to strengthen innovation across its private economy.

The province now has 49,000 high-tech enterprises. Private companies lead or participate in 80 percent of the province's major science and technology projects, while 135 private firms are involved in key provincial laboratories. Private companies also lead four of Zhejiang's 10 provincial technology innovation centers.

The private economy accounts for more than 67 percent of Zhejiang's GDP, 73 percent of tax revenue, 80 percent of imports and exports, 87 percent of employment, and 96 percent of business entities.

Artificial intelligence is emerging as another growth engine. Zhejiang has 194 EFLOPS (exa floating-point operations per second) of computing capacity in operation, with AI computing accounting for more than 96 percent.

DeepSeek and Qwen models continue to rank highly on global leaderboards, while ModelScope has become China's largest and the world's second-largest open-source AI community.

Revenue from Zhejiang's core AI industry reached around 680 billion yuan ($101.38 billion) in 2025, up more than 20 percent. From January to May this year, revenue totaled 338.4 billion yuan, up 23.6 percent year-on-year.