Jiangsu Digital Human Timeline

The first identifiable milestone in Jiangsu's digital human story falls in August 2017, when Silicon Intelligence Technology Group Co., Ltd. (硅基智能) was founded by serial entrepreneur Sima Huapeng in Nanjing's Yuhuatai District. The company's initial focus was AI voice interaction for financial and telecommunications customer service, establishing in Nanjing a foundation that would later become inseparable from the province's broader ambitions in virtual human technology.

Nanjing deepened its institutional AI infrastructure during the following year. In March 2018, Nanjing University formally established its School of Artificial Intelligence, the first such school among China's elite C9 universities. Professor Zhou Zhihua (周志华), a machine learning researcher internationally recognized as the first Chinese scholar elected fellow of five major global AI societies, was appointed Dean. Two months later, in May 2018, the school held its official inauguration ceremony in Nanjing, presided over jointly by the city's Municipal Party Secretary and the university president. The school admitted its first cohort of eighty undergraduates that September and signed AI research partnerships with JD.com and Megvii (旷视科技), embedding Nanjing's academic institutions into the national AI supply chain at a formative moment.

The province's first commercial digital human deployment occurred in November 2019, when Silicon Intelligence partnered with Nanjing Bank to launch two AI digital employees — Nannan (楠楠) and Jingjin (晶晶) — at the Zijinshan-Xinhe Financial Club annual meeting in Nanjing, in front of executives from more than one hundred small and medium banks. The pair represented the first commercial digital human deployment in China's banking sector, and the event marked Silicon Intelligence's public transformation from a voice-AI company into a visible pioneer in the emerging digital human landscape.

The following year brought a notable Jiangsu-linked development staged outside the province. In July 2020, Nanjing-based Original Force (原力数字科技), in collaboration with Kadokawa Aoba and Tencent Video, unveiled the virtual female eSports team Qianniao (千鸟, Thousand Birds) at the CCG EXPO in Shanghai. Original Force handled all three-dimensional character creation and project planning for the production, demonstrating that Nanjing studios were already operating at the frontier of virtual character work for national-scale IP launches.

Jiangsu entered a transformative period in 2021 through its public broadcasting infrastructure. In October 2021, Jiangsu Satellite TV (江苏卫视) premiered "2060," China's first virtual character music and talent competition show produced by a provincial television station. The program featured twenty-six virtual characters alongside their human creators, competing within a fully virtual venue called Star Ring City that was realized through holographic projection, augmented reality, virtual reality, and fifty Vicon motion-capture cameras, with episodes airing weekly on Friday evenings through December 2021. The following month, in November 2021, "2060" was presented at the Global TV Trends Forum in London, organized by French media consulting firm Médiamétrie, as a representative example of cutting-edge format innovation, extending Jiangsu Satellite TV's reach into international programming discourse.

The province closed 2021 with an event that commanded nationwide attention. At the Jiangsu Satellite TV New Year's Eve Concert broadcast on December 31, a virtual rendering of the late singer Teresa Teng (邓丽君) was brought to the stage to perform duets with live singer Zhou Shen, delivering three of her best-loved songs. The virtual Teresa Teng was created by Digital Domain Group (数字王国集团) using their proprietary Mystique Live system, which integrated world-class facial capture, motion capture, and visual effects. The same broadcast also featured virtual idol performances by Vsinger's roster, including the virtual singer Luo Tianyi, performing to the concert audience. The cultural and market impact was immediate: Digital Domain's stock surged twenty-five percent on the Hong Kong exchange when markets reopened in January 2022, triggering a broader virtual human concept stock rally across China's A-share market.

The momentum from that broadcast shaped activity across multiple Jiangsu cities through 2022. In March 2022, Suzhou Broadcasting System (苏州广播电视总台) deployed its first AI virtual anchor, Su Xiaoxin (苏小新), during coverage of the national Two Sessions political meetings, conducting live reporter links and audience interactions alongside human anchor Xiwen. Su Xiaoxin later appeared in the cultural program "Where Does Suzhou Come From," and the motion capture underpinning her performance was provided by NOKOV. In April 2022, the Suzhou High-tech Zone launched a hyper-realistic digital human named Fengling Lynn (枫灵Lynn) as the district's official Cultural, Sports, Tourism and Commerce Digital Recommender, designed with a fully developed persona including personality traits, zodiac sign, birthday, and stated preferences. Lynn was built for e-commerce livestreaming, advertising, brand endorsement, and IP merchandising, representing a landmark in the use of digital human identity within Jiangsu's municipal governance transformation.

Also in April 2022, Silicon Intelligence won the bid for Nanjing Bank's AI Service Manager system upgrade, advancing Nannan and Jingjin to a second-generation deployment that deepened AI-finance integration within the bank's operations. At the policy level, Jiangsu Province moved in July 2022 to embed digital humans in its rural development agenda, when the Provincial Cultural Tourism Bureau and five co-issuing departments released implementation opinions explicitly encouraging the use of virtual humans for rural product promotion and marketing. That September, Silicon Intelligence's digital human Ai Xia (爱夏) debuted as a digital host at the Nanjing Metaverse Industry Development Conference, where the company publicly reported having created more than one million digital laborers serving over forty industries and more than forty thousand organizations.

The year 2023 opened with a major policy signal from the provincial capital. In January 2023, Nanjing issued its Metaverse Industry Action Plan covering the years 2023 through 2025, targeting one hundred and thirty-five billion yuan in related industry scale by 2025 and acknowledging that over one hundred and thirty metaverse companies had already clustered in the city. The following month, in February 2023, Xinhua Daily published a feature documenting the rapid spread of AIGC digital human applications across Jiangsu, citing examples such as a Nanjing fried skewer shop running promotions through a digital human employee. The article reported Silicon Intelligence's cumulative tally at two million AI digital humans deployed and highlighted the Nanjing Commerce Bureau's Million Digital Human Entrepreneurship Plan as an initiative reshaping how small businesses across the city engaged with the technology. Jiangsu's AI industry was described as exceeding two hundred billion yuan in aggregate scale, with more than a thousand AI companies operating in the province.

The second quarter of 2023 saw Jiangsu's cultural heritage sector emerge as a prominent arena for digital human applications. In April 2023, the Nanjing Great Bao'en Temple Heritage Museum (大报恩寺遗址博物馆) opened trial operations of what was billed as China's first Fully Immersive Connected metaverse museum experience, developed in partnership with Original Force. The experience mapped eight interactive checkpoints to real museum locations, incorporated extended reality-enabled heritage interactions, and allowed visitors to create personal digital avatars through facial scanning. The following month, on World Museum Day in May 2023, the museum unveiled a digitally reconstructed Liuli Pagoda built using international-grade computer graphics produced by Original Force, alongside a forum titled "When Museums Meet the Metaverse." The project accumulated more than thirty-three million reads on Weibo and was subsequently recognized as a national smart tourism immersive experience pilot by China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

In June 2023, Nanjing released its Implementation Plan for the National Cultural Digitization Strategy, formally designating metaverse applications and immersive digital experiences as future industries and providing a policy scaffold for continued investment in this direction. The following month, in July 2023, Nanjing Wentu Group launched Wendu Mijing (文都秘境), a city-level cultural tourism metaverse platform covering more than twenty Nanjing landmarks including the Confucius Temple, the Qinhuai River area, and the Xinkou district, made available on both Apple and Android app stores. The year closed with a significant provincial policy commitment: at the tenth Jiangsu Internet Conference held in Nanjing in October 2023, the province officially released the Metaverse Industry Development Action Plan for 2024 through 2026, jointly issued by five provincial departments. The plan set a target of the metaverse industry exceeding one hundred billion yuan by 2026 with more than twenty percent annual growth, and articulated a structural layout calling for five ecosystem-leading enterprises, twenty specialized enterprises, and fifty or more demonstration application projects.

The year 2024 opened with Nanjing asserting its national position in digital human manufacturing. In March 2024, Xinhua Daily published a major feature titled "Digital Human, Made in Nanjing," profiling both Silicon Intelligence and Badianba Digital Technology (八点八数字科技), a company based in Nanjing's Jiangbei New Area, and demonstrating how a digital human video could be generated in three steps. The article noted that Nanjing's New Year's First Meeting for 2024 had specifically designated artificial intelligence and digital humans as priority sectors. In May 2024, the first Mobile Cup Jiangsu Provincial Digital Human Application Innovation Contest officially launched, co-hosted by the Jiangsu Artificial Intelligence Society (江苏省人工智能学会), Nanjing University, and Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, with China Mobile Jiangsu serving as implementing organizer. The contest brought together digital human products from Silicon Intelligence, SenseTime (商汤科技), and other companies, and featured a digital human named Su Xiaozong (苏小综) as a co-host of the event itself, an illustration of the technology deployed reflexively within the industry's own promotional infrastructure. The contest ran through November 2024.

June 2024 produced two notable pieces of coverage reflecting the breadth of Jiangsu's digital human ecosystem. People's Daily and the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Human Resources and Social Security jointly published a feature profiling Silicon Intelligence AI editor Yang Ailun at his Nanjing office, describing how digital humans had been helping small shops in Nanjing run livestreaming operations since 2023 and situating the trend within Jiangsu's digital profession ecosystem under the fourteenth Five-Year Plan. In the same month, Ziniu News published a feature titled "The Virtual Digital Humans of the Large Model Era Are Here," reporting from Original Force's offices in Nanjing's Jianye District and noting the company's role as creator of China's first full-motion-capture three-dimensional animated series "A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality." A researcher from the Jiangsu Provincial Academy of Social Sciences was quoted characterizing digital humans as the earliest commercially deployed application among the province's ten priority future industries.

The most significant institutional development in Wuxi's digital human story occurred in September 2024, when the First AI Digital Human Forum was held in the Wuxi High-tech District as part of the China International Intelligent Communication Forum, co-hosted by CCTV International Network Wuxi (央视国际网络无锡) and the Jiangsu Provincial Government. The forum launched several landmark initiatives: an "AI Digital Human Empowering All Industries" initiative centered on Wuxi and targeting the broader Yangtze River Delta; the establishment of a CCTV.com Digital Human Factory in Wuxi High-tech District integrating research and development, production, and applications under one roof; the inauguration of the CCTV.com Smart Media Academy Yangtze River Delta Branch in Wuxi; and the formation of the Wuxi High-tech District AI Industry Alliance. These initiatives collectively positioned Wuxi as an emerging national node for the production and deployment of media-oriented digital humans.

Jiangsu's activity in the digital human sector accelerated sharply through 2025. In March 2025, Silicon Intelligence open-sourced its digital human model HeyGem.ai on GitHub, enabling digital human cloning from a single second of video or a single photograph, with thirty-second cloning and sixty-second four-K video synthesis as headline specifications. The project attracted more than thirteen hundred GitHub stars within seventy-two hours of release, drawing international developer attention to work originating in Nanjing. Separately, Jiangsu Provincial Party Secretary Xin Changxing visited Silicon Intelligence as the first stop of an industrialization research tour through Nanjing, underscoring the company's standing within the province's technology policy hierarchy.

April 2025 was among the densest months in the province's entire decade-long period. Wuxi held what was described as the city's first press conference hosted by a digital human, at which the Wuxi All-Weather Service Digital Human Matrix was launched with more than twenty digital humans debuting simultaneously. Among the figures introduced were Huanxi (欢曦), Wuxi's official city spokesperson digital human built by CCTV International Network Wuxi; Fubao (福宝), an AI specialist for the Enterprise Service Platform; Xu Xiaoke (许小可), a government service assistant for the High-tech District; two data bureau digital humans named Xiao Cheng and Xiao Yun, trained on more than five thousand policy documents and one hundred and fifty thousand service guides; a cultural tourism digital human named Xiao Bo; and a Liangxi District digital human integrated with the DeepSeek large language model. Eighty enterprise digital assistants were showcased at the same event. During the same month, the Korea Virtual Human Industry Association (KOVHIA) president Oh Je-wook participated in the sixth Dongbuzhou Animation Week, which closed in Haimen, Nantong, drawing more than a thousand attendees from the domestic and international animation industry under the theme "Animation ×?" and featuring a signing ceremony for the Dongbuzhou Animation Base Industry-Education Integration project, making it a point of contact between Jiangsu's animation infrastructure and international virtual human industry bodies. Also in April 2025, the Jiangsu Provincial Government Office published the Digital Economy High-Quality Development Three-Year Action Plan covering 2025 through 2027, the successor document to the 2022–2024 plan, directing continued investment in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and digital economy infrastructure with digital humans named among the key application areas.

In May 2025, Silicon Intelligence completed a D-round financing of approximately two hundred million yuan from Jiaxing High-tech Investment in Zhejiang, bringing the company's post-money valuation to 3.15 billion yuan. The round brought total financing across eight rounds from December 2017 through May 2025 to approximately 869 million yuan, with investors including Tencent at a 16.59 percent stake, Sequoia China, and China Merchants Bank International. While the investment itself came from Zhejiang, Silicon Intelligence remained headquartered in Nanjing and its operations remained centered on the province.

Two distinct digital human service deployments emerged from Wuxi in the following months. In July 2025, Wuxi's first locally developed AI digital medical guide, named Xiao Jiang (数字导医·小江), launched at Jiangnan University Affiliated Hospital (无锡医院), developed in partnership with the Shenzhen Big Data Research Institute's Wuxi Innovation Center and described as a milestone in smart healthcare integration for the Yangtze River Delta. That same month, Silicon Intelligence CEO Yin Qiang presented the company's work at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization National Film Festival's Film Technology Exhibition in Chongqing, showcasing multimodal deep-learning digital humans capable of recognizing more than ten thousand objects and scenes with real-time posture, expression, and language adjustment, and outlining expansion plans into psychological health, family companionship, and Red Tourism applications — an event Jiangsu-linked by company origin though staged in Chongqing.

In August 2025, Silicon Intelligence began generating revenue from its fully automated content production platform, marking what the company described as a transition from AI Copilot to Autopilot — a shift from tool-based support toward outcome-oriented digital human solutions. Also in August, the digital human Fubao facilitated Jiangsu Province's first documented digital human plus online bidding procurement case on Wuxi's Online Intermediary Supermarket platform, compressing procurement costs by approximately fifteen percent and shortening selection cycles by more than a full day. The same month saw Wuxi launch a public security metaverse featuring a three-dimensional police digital human within a virtual service environment, extending the city's digital human deployments into law enforcement services and completing a year in which Wuxi had fielded digital humans across healthcare, government administration, enterprise procurement, and public security simultaneously.

In October 2025, Silicon Intelligence formally submitted its prospectus to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for a main board listing, with China Merchants International and DBS Asia as joint sponsors. The filing disclosed 2024 revenue of 655 million yuan, up from 223 million yuan in 2022; an adjusted net profit of 5.29 million yuan in the first half of 2025, representing the company's first-ever profitability; 145 authorized patents including 21 US patents; and open-source projects HeyGem and DUIX with a combined total of more than thirteen thousand GitHub stars. A successful listing would make Silicon Intelligence the first digital human company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

November 2025 brought further institutional consolidation in Wuxi. The Second AI Digital Human Forum was held in the city as part of the China International Intelligent Communication Forum, and the event marked the formal establishment of the Yangtze River Delta AI Digital Human Industry Alliance (长三角AI数字人产业联盟). The Yangtze River Delta AIGC Industry-Education Integration Community was launched at the same gathering, alongside the unveiling of a Digital Human Application Wuxi Joint Laboratory, and CCTV International Network Wuxi signed cooperation agreements with Wuxi Daily Media Group and Wuxi Huishan Investment Group. The forum also saw the release of the 2025 China Digital Human Industry Development Report, which ranked Wuxi sixth nationally in the Digital Human City Development Index with a score of 83.18, trailing only Shenzhen, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, while achieving a perfect score in the application scenarios dimension — a recognition that reflected the breadth of deployments the city had accumulated across the preceding two years.

In December 2025, the China Securities Regulatory Commission published supplementary-material requirements related to Silicon Intelligence's overseas listing application. The requirements directed the Nanjing company to provide clarifications on matters including national state-owned shareholder procedures, AI large model business application scenarios, whether any subsidiaries operate in restricted foreign investment areas, details of pending litigation, and confirmation that no prohibited circumstances applied to the overseas listing — bringing to a close a decade-long arc that had carried Silicon Intelligence from its founding in a Nanjing district to the threshold of Hong Kong's main board.

[Mar 2026]