This Beijing hub is home to 10 major AI labs driving China’s tech ambitions

Zhongguancun is often referred to as China’s equivalent to Silicon Valley, thanks to its heritage as an innovation hub, encompassing the country’s top two universities and a number of incubation centers for startups.

Established 30 years ago, the area is the birthplace for some of the country’s well-known technology firms and home to many international players’ China headquarters.

Today, Zhongguancun has about 9,000 hi-tech companies, including Chinese search engine and artificial intelligence champion Baidu, social media giant Sina Corp, as well as regional headquarters for global giants like Microsoft and Google. Nearly half of the country’s 70 unicorns are located in the area.

A view of Zhongguancun, Beijing / Photo credit: Wikipedia

Zhongguancun is also at the epicenter of a wider effort by Beijing municipal authorities to encourage the development of the AI industry, part of the country’s broader efforts to gain supremacy in a technology that has been called the fourth industrial revolution.

Here is a list of 10 AI labs in Zhongguancun (in alphabetical order).

1. Baidu Research

Situated inside Baidu Technology Park in the northwest of Beijing’s Haidian district, the center is the heart of the company’s research and development efforts in AI, complemented by similar facilities in Silicon Valley and Seattle.

The search giant, which committed to AI more than seven years ago, has earned the nickname the “Huangpu Military Academy of AI” – after China’s version of West Point – because it has become a cradle for training talent, some of whom end up starting their own ventures. In 2017, Baidu was handpicked by the central government to lead the country’s research efforts in AI.

Baidu vice president Wang Haifeng currently serves as the research center head, overseeing projects ranging from natural language processing and computer vision to autonomous driving and quantum computing.

2. Bytedance AI Lab

Bytedance, the world’s most valuable startup with a reported valuation of US$75 billion, operates a number of app-based content products, including the hugely successful news aggregator Jinri Toutiao and popular karaoke video app TikTok.

In that sense, its self-built AI Lab was founded in 2016 to serve the company’s overarching platforms. Research focuses on machine learning, data mining, voice recognition, computer graphics, augmented reality, and information security.

The Beijing-based startup says a key research advantage is the massive amount of data it collects from its apps, which can be used to refine existing AI models and explore new applications. The lab is led by Ma Weiying, vice president of Bytedance and former assistant managing director at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA).

3. Didi AI Labs

The country’s largest ride-hailing platform is using AI to solve the real-time transport needs of 1.3 billion people at home and millions more in overseas markets including Mexico, Australia, and Brazil.

4. Intel China Research Centre

5. Kuaishou Y-Tech

6. Megvii Research Institute

7. Microsoft Research Asia

8. SenseTime Research

9. Sinovation Ventures AI Institute

10. Sogou-Tsinghua Tiangong Institute for Intelligent Computing