BEIJING -- China had more than 6,000 artificial intelligence (AI) enterprises last year, while the scale of the country's core AI industry was expected to exceed 1.2 trillion yuan (about 171.39 billion U.S. dollars) in 2025, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said on Wednesday.

In 2025, domestic companies released multiple AI chip products, and the country's intelligent computing power capacity reached 1,590 EFLOPS last year, Zhang Yunming, vice minister of industry and information technology, said at a press conference.

EFLOPS, or ExaFLOPS, refers to a unit measuring computing performance, with each unit representing 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second.

AI applications have expanded to cover key industries including steel, non-ferrous metals, power and telecommunications, and are increasingly being applied in product research and development, quality inspection and customer service, said Zhang.

The vice minister noted that a 60-billion-yuan national AI industry investment fund has been launched, while over 40 key national and industry standards were formulated and released in 2025.

On concerns that AI innovation could affect employment, Zhang said technological progress often reshapes job structures and updates roles, adding that restructuring does not mean jobs will disappear and that iteration does not mean replacement.

Major technological shifts throughout history have ultimately boosted productivity, optimized employment structures and created new jobs through industrial transformation, Zhang explained.