On 20 August in Shenzhen, Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei sat down with Wen Shugang, chairman of China Huaneng Group, and Zhong Guodong, the state power giant’s general manager. The meeting was framed around national strategy and the front edge of industry, but Ren used it to make a sharper point about where China’s artificial-intelligence advantage actually comes from.
Ren told the Huaneng delegation that China’s development of AI rests on two foundational strengths: its power advantage and its telecom-network advantage. In his reading, the unglamorous infrastructure, cheap and abundant electricity plus a ubiquitous, high-quality mobile network, is what lets Chinese firms train and run models at a scale and cost their rivals struggle to match. The two sides, he added, have wide room to cooperate in AI, computing power, and the coordination of computing with electricity, pooling their core strengths to support new-energy growth and a next-generation power system.
Wen thanked Huawei for its long-standing support and described the two groups as having a deep, fruitful cooperation base. He urged both sides to widen the field of collaboration and deepen joint technical innovation, helping the energy sector move up the ladder of digitalisation and intelligent upgrade.
China Huaneng is the less familiar name to tech readers. Founded in 1985, it is a central state-owned integrated energy group built around power generation with multi-energy coordination and a global footprint. It runs 57 second-tier units and more than 480 third-tier enterprises, and controls five listed companies: Huaneng Power International, Inner Mongolia Huaneng, XinNeng Taishan, Huaneng Hydropower, and Great Wall Securities. The group employs 123,000 people. Pairing a national grid-scale utility with Huawei’s chips, models, and telecom stack is exactly the kind of power-plus-compute coupling Ren has been signalling for more than a year.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Sohu report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.