BEIJING, August 13 — China’s National Data Administration (NDA) on Wednesday released a comprehensive three-year action plan to build a unified national data element market, aiming to break down regional data silos and capitalize on the surging demand for high-quality datasets driven by domestic artificial intelligence development.
The strategic roadmap marks a decisive shift in China’s digital economy, moving beyond basic infrastructure deployment — such as 5G and fiber optics — toward treating data as a formal factor of production, alongside land, labor, and capital.
Data Assetization and Market Scale According to the NDA’s mid-year report released alongside the plan, the scale of China’s data trading market exceeded 150 billion yuan ($20.8 billion) in the first half of 2026. A landmark accounting policy allowing enterprises to capitalize data assets on their balance sheets, fully implemented in 2024, has now been adopted by more than 100 listed companies. This mechanism has unlocked billions in new collateral for tech and advanced manufacturing firms, fundamentally altering corporate valuation models.
Pivoting to AI Computing Power Addressing the computational bottleneck for domestic AI development, the updated “Eastern Data, Western Computing” initiative is aggressively pivoting toward intelligent computing. The NDA announced the full interconnection of 10 national hub nodes, creating a unified national computing power network designed to supply low-cost, green energy-powered computing power to eastern AI startups and tech giants, bypassing localized bandwidth constraints.
Algorithmic Urban Governance At the municipal level, the focus has shifted from hardware deployment to AI-driven governance. Major metropolitan areas are now integrating municipal data lakes with sovereign Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate urban traffic management, optimize public safety grids, and streamline citizen services. This transition moves Chinese smart cities past early pilot phases into scalable, algorithmic governance.
Cross-Border Data and Geopolitics Addressing international observers’ concerns over data security and decoupling, the NDA also outlined new pilot zones for cross-border data flows in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hainan. These zones aim to establish “whitelists” for multinational corporations, facilitating secure data transfers that align with international frameworks like the DEPA, while strictly ring-fencing critical national security and genomic datasets.
The aggressive push underscores Beijing’s strategic calculus: in the global AI race, proprietary algorithms are secondary to the scale, quality, and liquidity of underlying data. By engineering a unified national data market, China is attempting to forge a new engine for its modern economy amidst an increasingly fragmented global tech landscape.