China's generative AI user base doubles to 515M (36.5%) in 6 months (www.scmp.com)

China’s state-run China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) reported that generative AI users more than doubled in the first half of the year to 515 million people — an adoption rate of 36.5% — rising from the end of December. Growth has been driven by heavy state support for an “AI Plus” strategy and upgraded infrastructure, and is concentrated among younger, well-educated users (74.6% under 40; 37.5% with higher education). With major U.S. models effectively blocked on the mainland, domestic systems such as DeepSeek, Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen and ByteDance’s Doubao have rapidly gained market share. For the AI/ML community this signals a large, fast-growing user base supplying data, feedback and commercial demand that will accelerate model development, localization and productization inside China. The scale makes China a key testbed for multimodal services, vertical applications and human-AI interaction research, while also underscoring geopolitical and technical implications: local model dominance reinforces tech sovereignty, shifts investment and talent toward domestic stacks, and increases regulatory scrutiny on safety, data governance and cross-border model access. Researchers and companies worldwide should expect intensified competition, more China-specific benchmarks and expanded opportunities for collaboration or rivalry in applied AI.