Beijing is making an ambitious bid to turn China’s vast ocean of data into fuel for artificial intelligence and economic growth with the launch of a centralised national data group, though experts warn its success will depend on tearing down entrenched data-sharing barriers.

The venture – established on October 20 as a centrally managed state-owned enterprise headquartered in Xiongan New Area, Hebei province – signals Beijing’s intent to translate its digital trove into competitive advantage.

Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang described the move as a “major strategic decision” aimed at strengthening China’s competitiveness in AI and the digital economy, the South China Morning Post reported last week.

By coordinating data resources at the national level, the group was expected to lower the costs of sharing and using data, accelerate its transformation into commercially valuable assets, and support the development of China’s economy, said Zhou Lisha, research director at Tsinghua University’s Institute for Modern State-Owned Enterprises.

The move was expected to help drive economic growth by unlocking the value of China’s vast data resources, Zhou said in comments recently published by the university’s Xiuzhong College.

The initiative underscores Beijing’s intensifying drive to ramp up the infrastructure underpinning its growing AI industry.

Sun Yi, a professor at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the new group could help establish unified data standards and coordinate data collection and procurement, providing high-quality data sets for domestic AI models and embodied AI applications, including robotics.

Such efforts could lower the overall cost of training AI models, Sun was quoted as saying in a report by state media People’s Daily on Monday.

Beijing is backing the entity with a slew of mega state-backed enterprises, including the country’s major telecoms carriers and power grid operators. That structure could allow it to tap into its backers’ incumbent resources and infrastructure, analysts at Guohai Haitong Securities said in a clients’ note last week.

n, head of the digitisation department at China Southern Power Grid, one of the data group’s shareholders, said the company would connect its energy-sector data-sharing infrastructure with the group’s national platform to facilitate data circulation and develop applications integrating computing power and electricity resources, according to Monday’s report by People’s Daily.

The strategic push comes amid rapid expansion. China’s data industry grew 15.7 per cent year on year to 6.78 trillion yuan (US$1.02 trillion) in 2025, with the number of companies operating in the sector reaching 482,000, statistics compiled by the National Data Administration showed.

Yet some experts have flagged potential headwinds, warning that the group must navigate fragmented data standards, unclear ownership rights and the difficulty of coordinating resources held by different companies and government agencies.

Yu Fenghui, a senior researcher affiliated with Pangoal Institution, a Beijing-based think tank, said long-standing barriers to data sharing and commercialisation remained, including inadequate safeguards for transactions and inconsistent standards across regional trading platforms.

The industry’s main challenge had shifted from a lack of regulations to fragmented rules that hindered data flows across regions and industries, Yu was quoted as saying in a recent report by the Securities Times.

Beyond technical and regulatory hurdles, the new data group faces an institutional balancing act.

An editorial published by the state-backed People’s Posts and Telecommunications News last week warned that the group’s biggest challenge would be striking a balance between its state-backed role and market-oriented operations.

“Excessive administrative intervention could squeeze out innovation by private enterprises, while an excessive pursuit of commercial profits would undermine its original mission,” the editorial said.

The group should act as an “enabler rather than a replacement” for existing businesses by focusing on infrastructure, data-sharing standards and major applications, it added.