Huawei and 14 Partners Launch Global AI CITY Ecosystem Alliance

Summit brings together more than 500 participants

According to Huawei, the Global Government AI CITY Innovation Summit gathered over 500 participants, including global industry experts, government representatives and ecosystem partners. The theme was "Digitalize & Innovate Cities, AI Delivers Value to All Nations," and discussions focused on how AI and data can support industry development, government services and city governance.

Huawei invited customers from Angola, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia, as well as the Chinese cities of Guangzhou and Shanghai, to share their experiences building AI CITY projects. Tao Jingwen, Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board at Huawei, gave a welcome speech. Yang Ruikai, CEO of Huawei Government Public Services Digitalization BU, also attended.

Tao said AI is integrating deeply into all aspects of city development, and that compute and data have become core drivers of high-quality city development. He said Huawei will work with ecosystem partners and global government customers to explore paths for the digital and intelligent transformation of government services and cities.

AI agents and the technical reference architecture

In his keynote, Simon Zou, Vice President of Government Public Services Digitalization BU and President of Marketing & Solution Sales at Huawei, presented examples from Shenzhen's Longgang District and the city of Shantou. He described two types of agents. A city governance agent makes city safety visible, reduces labor costs with compute and improves governance efficiency. A government service agent enables "Chat-to-Process" and shifts services from citizens crowding service windows and guessing the policies to a proactive, user-centric model that delivers benefits directly to those eligible.

Zou also described the Token Factory cross-border model. Under it, power is consumed locally, data stays within borders and AI services are exported globally. Huawei says this empowers the local AI industry and promotes cross-border cooperation.

Huawei and partner cities have also proposed an AI CITY technical reference architecture. It uses OpenHarmony as the unified foundation for different types of city terminals and relies on the compute of Ascend AI to enable device-edge-cloud intelligent collaboration. According to Huawei, this allows a new AI CITY Solution to support large-scale deployment of the scenarios above.

Research report on the shift to city super agents

Huawei and the State Information Center of China jointly released the AI CITY Development Research Report 2026. The report defines a paradigm for AI CITY and argues that cities are moving from a "data-driven" era to an era of "city super agents." It says AI CITY will rest on intelligent computing and city public clouds, support high-value intelligent scenarios, and shift the focus from building capabilities to delivering value. It includes benchmark cases from Shenzhen, Wuhan and Karamay, which it presents as replicable paths for city upgrades.

The alliance and what comes next

At the close of the summit, Huawei and 14 global partners launched the Global AI CITY Innovation & Development Ecosystem Alliance. Named partners include TIS, Egabi Solution, HMN Tech, Epoint and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). The alliance will focus on compute collaboration, data circulation and scenario innovation.

The announcement points to the establishment of the World Data Organization and the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) as signs that global cooperation on AI and data is entering a new phase. Under the theme "Smart-Digital Innovative Cities, AI for Global Inclusion," Huawei said it hopes to work with more customers and partners. For governments considering AI-based city services, the alliance and the research report offer a reference framework and case examples, though the source does not give details on membership terms, funding or timelines.