Digital and intelligent industries will remain a key focus for Southwest China's Guizhou province over the next five years, cementing its status as a major computing hub, Governor Li Bingjun said at a news conference on Monday.

"Industries including intelligent computing have driven much of Guizhou's growth in recent years. During the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-30), we will focus our efforts on nurturing and building six pillar industries, including digital and intelligent industries," Li said at the briefing where the province's priorities were outlined.

Although Guizhou is a mountainous province, its big data industry, which began to take shape in 2013, has helped place it at the forefront of China's digital economy.

Major data centers have been established in the province, including facilities operated by tech giants Huawei, Tencent and Apple, as well as the three national telecom carriers.

By January this year, Guizhou had 50 data centers under construction or in operation, with total computing power exceeding 160 EFLOPS.

The scale of Guizhou's digital and intelligent industries rose 9.8 percent year-on-year in 2025, while employment in the sector surpassed 163,000 people.

According to the province's outline for the 15th Five-Year Plan, released earlier this year, the digital economy is the first sector listed in its modern industrial system.

The plan covers intelligent computing, industry-specific large language models, the digital transformation of the economy and society, and sets a target of 500 billion yuan ($73.71 billion) in output value for digital and intelligent industry clusters by 2030.

At the briefing, Cai Chaolin, vice-governor of Guizhou, said artificial intelligence will build on the province's data industry foundation and be integrated more deeply into economic and social development.

For industrial development, Cai said the province is nurturing AI applications in precise mineral exploration, refined mining, coal mine disaster monitoring and early warning, and the upgrading of baijiu brewing techniques. In public services, it is developing AI-assisted medical checkups and diagnosis, education and training, and elderly care monitoring.

Cai cited the tourism AI agent Huangxiaoxi as one example.

Through the agent's interface, users can customize routes and book tickets and hotels with a single sentence. The agent also draws on Guizhou's tourism database and updates in real time, tracking visitor flows, dining discounts and other dynamic information to provide route planning and crowd alerts.

The plan also calls for industry-specific large models to be deployed in sectors including baijiu production, coal mining, urban management, education and forest fire warnings.

Cai said Guizhou will also leverage its strengths in power resources and computing capacity to provide efficient computing services nationwide.

"The goal is to allow market players to use Guizhou's computing power as easily as using water and electricity," he said.