China’s vast bureaucratic machinery is once again being deployed to supercharge a new technology wave, this time mobilising thousands of solo artificial intelligence entrepreneurs under what is being called a national push to grow the country’s AI industry. Local governments across the country are competing to attract what are termed “one-person companies,” or OPCs, startups run by a single founder leveraging artificial intelligence tools to build and operate technology products without the need for venture capital or a team of employees. From free apartments to subsidised computing power and special loan programmes, the incentives on offer mark a concerted state-led effort to seed a new generation of micro-startups and accelerate overall AI adoption across the Chinese economy.
The OPC movement began gaining momentum in November 2025 when the city of Suzhou pledged to build 30 dedicated OPC communities and cultivate 1,000 such enterprises by 2028. Other localities quickly followed. Shanghai’s Pudong district offered to cover startup computing costs of up to 300,000 yuan, equivalent to around $44,000, while the city of Wuhan introduced special loans for AI solopreneurs and promised to absorb a portion of losses in the event of a default. The pattern mirrors how China has previously used central directives combined with local government competition to rapidly scale new industries, from electronic commerce to electric vehicles. As Lin Zhang, an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire who researches China’s digital economy, put it: when new technology emerges, the entire bureaucratic system is mobilised to develop it.
The subsidies are being channelled through a growing network of incubators appearing across the country, some set up in idle state-owned data centers and coworking spaces that were built during the AI infrastructure boom but left underutilised due to insufficient market demand. One such incubator, run in Hangzhou’s Luohu district, is working to sponsor over 50 artificial intelligence startups, connecting founders to potential clients and suppliers in manufacturing and trading. In some facilities, domestic chip-equipped data centers are using the OPC subsidy programme as a means to attract long-term tenants, given that their chips do not integrate easily with systems designed to run on Nvidia architecture. Several district governments are also subsidising entrepreneurs to integrate OpenClaw, a viral open-source artificial intelligence agent capable of handling tasks such as managing emails and building websites, into industrial applications, despite known security concerns around the tool.
Beyond the economics of idle infrastructure, the OPC push carries significant social dimensions. It offers a career lifeline to tech workers facing widespread layoffs and the existential anxiety of being replaced by artificial intelligence. Among them is Ma Ruipeng, 41, a programmer who left a two-decade career three months ago to build artificial intelligence software from his Beijing apartment, using tools including Claude Code and Figma to develop applications that help users create mobile software. He has yet to generate revenue and is living off his savings, but his outlook reflects a sentiment that appears to be driving much of the OPC phenomenon: that the most resilient response to artificial intelligence disruption is not resistance, but active collaboration with the technology itself.
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