On 20 December 2024 the General Office of the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government issued the implementation plan for AI “Model the City” (模塑申城), carried as Hu Fu Ban Fa [2024] No. 27. The plan advances AI applications in city building and industry, treating Shanghai itself as the deployment environment rather than a single sector.
What the plan sets out
The plan is deliberately broad. It points to urban governance, public services, manufacturing and other industry settings as places where models should be applied, and it links those applications to computing supply and model development. Rather than funding models in isolation, it frames demand — real city scenarios — as the driver.
That is a meaningful design choice. Compute-first policies build capacity; scenario-first policies build usage. The intelligent computing cloud plan addresses the supply side, while the open-source system plan addresses the ecosystem layer between raw capacity and finished products.
From plan to procurement
For companies, plans matter because they precede budgets. When a municipal government names application areas, those areas become procurement lines, pilot programmes and grant categories in the following year. The Shanghai AI application subsidy is where that intention turns into money, and the national AI application service provider action plan shows the same logic at a larger scale.
Read together, the documents describe a funnel: city scenarios create demand, subsidies lower the cost of entering them, and computing and open-source measures make entry technically feasible. A company that ignores any one of the three tends to find the other two less useful than expected.
Practical actions for AI companies
First, identify which named scenarios fit your product. A generic pitch is far weaker than a proposal tied to a scenario the plan explicitly lists.
Second, prepare the eligibility paperwork early. Subsidy and pilot programmes reward companies that can document local presence, project scope and measurable outcomes.
Third, treat public-sector deployment as a compliance project as well as a sales project. Data handling, procurement rules and security review all apply, and a weak compliance posture will surface during evaluation rather than after award.
The plan is not a licence to operate, and it imposes no new obligations. It is a map of where public demand will be concentrated — which, for an AI company choosing where to invest, is often more useful.
This article is based on the Shanghai ‘Model the City’ implementation plan (Hu Fu Ban Fa [2024] No. 27) and public information and is for reference only; it does not constitute legal advice.