According to data from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), China has become the world’s largest holder of artificial intelligence patents, accounting for approximately 60% of the global total.
Based on inventor address statistics covering the period from 2014 to 2023, WIPO reports that the top five sources of generative AI patents worldwide are:
China, the United States, South Korea, Japan, and India.
In the academic sector, newly added generative AI patents are concentrated primarily in Chinese institutions. In 2024, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranked first with 492 newly added generative AI patents, followed by Zhejiang University and Tsinghua University.
According to the 57th Statistical Report on China’s Internet Development, released on February 5, 2026, in terms of users and industry development, as of December 2025, the number of generative AI users in China reached 602 million, representing a 141.7% increase compared with 249 million at the end of 2024, with the penetration rate rising to 42.8%. China currently has more than 6,000 artificial intelligence enterprises, and the core industry scale is expected to exceed RMB 1.2 trillion.
Penetration Rate of Generative AI Users in China
In terms of infrastructure, China’s intelligent computing capacity has exceeded 1590 EFLOPS, providing support for large model training and deployment.