China's gaming industry at ChinaJoy in Shanghai frames artificial intelligence as the key driver of future growth and global expansion, signaling AI as the cornerstone of the sector's next phase.

Baidu AI Cloud holds about half the market, partnering with major game companies and more than 100 AI gaming firms to offer full-stack AI capabilities, including AI Heterogeneous Compute and the Baidu Qianfan platform.

AI technologies, from large language and multimodal models to AI agents, are transforming game development and operations, with the AI gaming cloud supporting everything from design and prototyping to testing, publishing, and live operations.

Industry leaders stress that AI will enable ongoing creation of new gameplay, characters, and experiences, with creativity, aesthetics, and user insights driving future competition as much as production speed.

SEELE AI and Baidu collaborate to automatically generate interactive 3D game worlds from natural language and multimodal inputs, covering character modeling, animation, scene construction, mechanics, and narrative.

Baidu technologies empower studios like SingularDance and SEELE AI to create AI-native game worlds and advanced virtual characters via natural language and multimodal inputs, spanning concept to 3D modeling, animation, code, and gameplay.

Shengqu Games and Zhejiang Century Huatong broaden globalization and collaboration, announcing a new tie-up with South Korea's NC Corp and the reveal of AION 2 at ChinaJoy 2026.

China's AI gaming cloud market reached about 1.86 billion yuan last year and is projected to surge to roughly 11 billion yuan by 2029, with the potential to exceed half of the gaming cloud market.