China’s generative AI user base crosses 700 million, covering over half the population

China’s generative artificial intelligence user base surpassed 700 million at the end of June, accounting for more than half of the population as wide AI adoption pushes the technology’s penetration rate to a record high in the country.

The user base data, released Tuesday by the China Internet Network Information Centre, represents an increase of 16 per cent from the end of 2025, when China had 602 million generative AI users with a penetration rate of 42.8 per cent.

Question-and-answer services remain the most common use of generative AI in China. In a survey of users, 76 per cent said they used the technology to seek answers. Nearly half, or 48 per cent, employed AI tools to process images or videos, while 38 per cent used it for text processing and 33 per cent for work summaries, meeting notes or presentations.

The report said AI adoption had also expanded beyond software. Some 39 per cent of users had bought smart hardware online during the past six months.

As well as gaining traction in the consumer market, Chinese AI labs – which develop models to power the consumer applications and hardware – have advanced their technologies, according to the report, citing trillion-parameter open-weight models launched this year from domestic giants including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI.

The digital infrastructure that lays the foundation for AI computation also grew rapidly. As of the end of June, intelligent computing capacity in the country surged by 177 per cent to 2,185 eflops from a year earlier, the report said. Eflops, short for exa floating-point operations per second, is a unit for measuring the speed of a computer system.

The rapid expansion echoed an earlier Morgan Stanley survey that found AI adoption in China has surpassed that of the United States. Some 80 per cent of Chinese respondents used AI for personal purposes at least once a week, compared with 54 per cent in the US, the bank said in a report earlier this month.

It attributed China’s advantage largely to the integration of AI into widely used shopping, messaging, search and entertainment platforms rather than superior model performance.