Breakthrough in the 3 Trillion Yuan Plan for Jinan Metropolitan Area Embracing Research and Development in Space Blockchain and Other Technologies

Recently, the Shandong Provincial Government website announced the “Development Plan for Jinan Metropolitan Area (2024-2030)”. The plan clearly states that by 2030, the total economic output of the metropolitan area will exceed 3 trillion yuan, with an annual average growth rate of more than 10% for research and development investment. In terms of new digital economy formats, the plan supports leading digital economy enterprises in establishing industry ecological cooperation mechanisms, jointly organizing digital economy project promotion activities, and promoting the landing of approximately 200 digital economy projects. In the fields of quantum technology, blockchain, and metaverse, it will lay out tasks for technology research and integrated innovation, and construct a technological system that leads the future industrial innovation development. It aims to accelerate the construction of the Jinan National Artificial Intelligence Innovation Application Pilot Zone, create an “artificial intelligence +” integrated open platform, and foster an artificial intelligence industry cluster with core competitiveness. Additionally, it will layout the new generation of high-performance computing facilities and big data processing platforms, promote the integration of Jinan National E-level supercomputing centers into the national distributed supercomputing internet system, and build an edge computing node resource pool. In the context of the new wave of technological revolution, the digital economy has become one of the key industries that many cities are vying to lay out. As the core stronghold for Shandong’s digital empowerment construction, Jinan has vigorously enhanced the development level of its core digital economy industries in recent years. By 2023, the scale of Jinan’s core digital economy industries reached 655.9 billion yuan, with the scale and added value of the digital economy core industries ranking at the forefront of the province. By 2025, the scale of Jinan’s core digital economy industries will reach 800 billion yuan, and the proportion of the digital economy in the GDP will exceed 52%. In terms of the metaverse, Jinan has successively introduced multiple policies emphasizing full support for the innovative ecological cultivation of the metaverse, and has launched key application scenario construction for “metaverse + production and manufacturing”, “metaverse + smart cities”, “metaverse + cultural tourism”, “metaverse + education and training”, “metaverse + healthcare”, providing the highest support of up to 10 million yuan. Liu Qiang, the Secretary of the Jinan Municipal Party Committee, pointed out that the metaverse is an important frontier in the new generation of information technology. It is necessary to be demand-oriented, continuously expand application scenarios, and enrich the supply of metaverse products. In terms of the “cornerstone” of the metaverse industry, Jinan has become a veritable highland of computing power in China, supplying more than one third of the country’s servers and over 50% of AI computing power. Key projects such as the Huawei (Jinan) Artificial Intelligence Computing Center and the Baidu Intelligent Cloud (Jinan) Intelligent Computing Center have accelerated their establishment. By 2023, Jinan’s computing power reached 1900P, ranking first in the province, and the validation computing cluster constructed by the Jinan National Supercomputing Center topped the research-oriented ranking list of 10-node clusters. It also opened the Jinan National Internet Backbone Direct Connection Point, completed the main body capacity construction of the “Xinghuo-Chain Network” super node, and built a deterministic backbone network covering 5600 kilometers across the 16 cities in the province. In addition, the first batch of enterprise technology innovation project plans in Shandong Province for 2024 has begun to be applied for. This year, the enterprise technology innovation project has added a special “future industry” category, encouraging enterprises to focus on future industries such as metaverse, artificial intelligence, life sciences, future networks, quantum information, humanoid robots, deep-sea and aerospace, and strengthening forward-looking research layouts.