The General Office of China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued its AI SME Entrepreneurship Support Plan for 2026–2028 on 4 September Beijing time. Coverage of Chinese AI policy defaults to Beijing pouring money in. This document contains no money at all.
The targets are counts of firms
The plan sets a three-year goal of more than 10,000 newly cultivated sci-tech and innovative SMEs, and more than 2,000 "specialised, refined, distinctive and innovative" little-giant enterprises. Priority fields named are industry applications, data services and intelligent compute. Nothing in the quoted text attaches a yuan figure to any of it — the commitment is a pipeline target, not a subsidy.
Compute is rationed, not bought
The mechanism is allocation through the state's China Computing Power Platform, pooling and elastically allocating resources to give startups low-cost compute, with edge capacity built on demand. That is a control mechanism as much as a subsidy, and it matters more now that Chinese startups cannot freely buy Nvidia parts: the state decides who gets accelerators.
The data is opened in an orderly manner
The plan calls for high-quality sector datasets in smart manufacturing, materials R&D and biomedicine, to be built first and then opened to AI startups — the text uses the word orderly. That is a licensing regime on terms the state sets, not an open data release. The plan also blesses new commercial actors explicitly: one-person companies and "super individuals", open-source core contributors and agent developers.
What the received framing gets wrong
Beyond the absent money, the quiet headline is AtomGit. The plan backs it as the national-level AI open-source community and urges startups to contribute models, tools and datasets to it — an attempt to build a domestic substitute for GitHub and Hugging Face, landing in the same week Nvidia moved to acquire Hugging Face. One caveat belongs on the record: MIIT's own document list renders as an empty JavaScript shell and its publishing API returns errors, so the text here is as quoted at length by a first-hand Chinese outlet naming the issuing office and title, not read on the ministry's page.