The next major frontier in artificial intelligence is its application to science, where the challenge is to use AI to shorten the entire discovery cycle—from hypothesis formation to experimental validation and learning from results.

The United States has explicitly embraced this shift through the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, which aims to integrate 17 national laboratories into a unified discovery platform to double the productivity and impact of US research within a decade. This year, the Genesis Mission announced a partnership with Japan, emphasizing that AI for science is evolving into a collaborative infrastructure and network rather than just another AI model.

China is pursuing a similar path, increasingly focusing on city-level initiatives. Beijing’s 2025 plan targets the development of common scientific-intelligence infrastructure, at least 10 high-quality scientific databases, over 10 million users, and at least eight benchmark applications by 2027. Meanwhile, Shanghai’s “Hundred Teams, Hundred Projects” initiative supports up to 70% of approved investments, capped at 50 million yuan (US$6 million).

Shenzhen stands out with its 2024 investment of 245.31 billion yuan in research and development—the highest R&D intensity among Chinese cities. Notably, companies account for over 93% of this spending, highlighting the city’s strong corporate role in advancing AI for science. This corporate involvement is crucial because the challenge lies not only in inventing algorithms but also in transforming them into reliable scientific tools.

These developments suggest that Shenzhen is well-positioned to win the emerging global competition in AI-driven scientific discovery.

Sources