The provincial government has recently issued the Implementation Opinions on Expanding and Upgrading the Service Sector, systematically outlining measures across three key areas: enhancing digital information service supply, strengthening technology-driven empowerment for industrial upgrades, and advancing the digital-smart transformation of the service sector. These efforts aim to cultivate new quality productive forces, create fresh economic growth drivers, and support the province's high-quality socioeconomic development through a more capable and efficient service industry.
Strengthening the Digital Foundation to Boost Comprehensive Service Capabilities
The Opinions designate digital information as one of the three priority areas within producer services, leveraging Yunnan's developmental realities and comparative advantages to focus on software, information transmission, data, and information technology. The goal is to elevate digital information service supply and provide robust underlying support for the construction of Digital Yunnan.
Initiatives include launching an "Artificial Intelligence Plus" action plan, establishing and utilizing the Kunming International Communications Gateway, advancing 5G-A and mobile IoT infrastructure, fostering "green power plus intelligent computing," and exploring an "external data, internal computing, external application" model. These targeted measures aim to deepen the integration of next-generation information technology with the service sector, continuously generating new digital scenarios, business forms, and models, while strengthening innovation-driven and transformation-led momentum. The ultimate objective is to accelerate the creation of an international communications and digital services hub oriented toward South and Southeast Asia.
Industry experts note that Yunnan possesses both a strategic geographic advantage facing South and Southeast Asia and nationally leading green power resources. This policy deeply integrates these two strengths to address gaps in digital information service supply, positioning Yunnan to evolve from a transit node for digital corridors into a regional digital services hub with full-chain supply capabilities.
Across the province, computing infrastructure construction continues to accelerate. Cross-border optical cable bandwidth on the China-Laos and China-Myanmar routes is being expanded, and new business forms such as minority language AI translation, cross-border e-commerce, and comprehensive cross-border data services are rapidly gaining traction. Yunnan's cross-border digital information service capabilities are steadily expanding.
At the Yunsheng 5G Big Data Industrial Park, the Kunming AI Computing Center is delivering computing power to dozens of enterprises. Since commencing operations, the center has closely aligned with the "AI Plus" initiative, driving new quality productive forces across the entire chain—from computing supply and industrial upgrades to enterprise innovation—and has incubated multiple application cases in smart healthcare and intelligent manufacturing, filling Yunnan's void in large-scale, public, high-performance computing clusters. The province's computing network is now demonstrating growing synergies, with artificial intelligence progressively entering various industries and daily life, much like electricity.
China Telecom Yunnan is accelerating the construction of "computing-power coordination" by integrating green-powered computing resources from its Two-Asia Data Center into the China Telecom Group's national "Xirang" computing network, enabling users to access high-quality computing services at more affordable prices. China Mobile Yunnan has launched an AI computing service platform called the "Token Factory," which comprehensively addresses diverse scenarios ranging from routine office work and large-scale content production to industry-specific custom development.
"The Opinions identify digital information services as a core area for addressing shortcomings in producer services, precisely targeting Yunnan's two most distinctive comparative advantages—abundant green power and a unique geographic location," said Li Jing'an, General Manager of Cloud Network Development at China Telecom Yunnan. He added that the next steps involve fully implementing the Opinions, accelerating the operational launch of the Kunming International Communications Gateway to provide a solid foundation for cross-border industrial collaboration, digital cultural exports, and communications security for overseas-bound enterprises. The company will also leverage its Two-Asia Intelligent Computing Center, continuously expanding capacity while promoting direct green power connections and coordinated computing-power supply to convert green energy advantages into computing cost advantages. Additionally, new-generation communications networks will be applied to distinctive scenarios in industry, cultural tourism, agriculture, and low-altitude economy, providing robust support for the province's digital transformation.
Technology Services Driving Industrial Upgrades Toward Higher Value Chains
The deep integration of next-generation information technology with the service sector has become a core engine for service industry development. Empowering high-quality service sector growth through technology is both an inherent requirement for cultivating new quality productive forces and a strategic move to build a modern industrial system and meet people's aspirations for a better life.
The Opinions focus on four dimensions—R&D and design, intellectual property, commercialization of scientific achievements, and inspection, testing, and certification—to tightly bind technology services with real industries. This approach aims to resolve the long-standing challenges of Yunnan's characteristic industries, which have often been large in scale but weak in competitiveness and low in added value.
Experts suggest that while Yunnan boasts rich resource endowments, many products remain at the primary processing stage. By perfecting the full chain of technology services, the Opinions effectively install an innovation engine for characteristic industries, allowing high-quality Yunnan products to shift from selling resources to selling technology, standards, and brands.
As a major agricultural province, Yunnan is promoting the deep integration of artificial intelligence with plateau-specific agriculture. A range of research outcomes are rapidly transitioning from laboratories to fields, being applied in industries such as tea, sugarcane, traditional Chinese medicine, and flowers, significantly enhancing production efficiency, quality control, and green standards. For instance, crawler-type tea-picking robots adapted for complex mountainous tea gardens alleviate labor shortages while improving the quality of freshly picked leaves. Additionally, the coordinated use of IoT, drone remote sensing, and AI algorithms enables intelligent identification and early warning of risks such as pests, drought, and nutrient imbalances in tea gardens.
Recently, leveraging the smart tea garden project at Yunnan Agricultural University's Tea College, multiple digital tea garden demonstration bases have been established in major tea-producing regions including Pu'er, Lincang, and Xishuangbanna, effectively improving the precision, standardization, and intelligence of tea garden production management.
Wang Baijuan, Dean of the Tea College at Yunnan Agricultural University, believes that "AI Plus agriculture" represents a systematic reshaping of the entire agricultural industry chain and serves as the core driving force for cultivating new quality productive forces in agriculture and advancing agricultural modernization. It not only spawns new agricultural technology service formats such as smart management and intelligent monitoring but also promotes the integrated development of "production plus services," facilitating the digital-smart transformation of plateau-specific agriculture.
"The issuance of the Opinions has clarified the direction for empowering distinctive industries through technology services," Wang stated. She recommended further unblocking the channels for translating industry-academia-research achievements, accelerating the conversion of research value into industrial value, and improving a tiered promotion system to lower the barriers to adopting digital-smart technologies, addressing the issue of "can't use, don't dare to use" digital tools. She also called for building a multi-party collaboration mechanism involving universities, enterprises, and bases to develop replicable practical models, ensuring technology services genuinely reach the front lines of industry.
Furthermore, the Opinions propose establishing a provincial-level AI platform for empowering the service sector and implementing projects for the digital-smart empowerment of commerce and logistics. These measures are designed to comprehensively advance the digital-smart transformation of services, driving iterative upgrades in livelihood sectors such as cultural tourism, community services, healthcare, and wellness. Using digital technology to reconstruct operational models and service experiences in the service sector will effectively bridge information gaps between service providers and consumers, delivering the benefits of digital development to businesses and the public alike.