According to an official announcement on the Shanghai Municipal People's Government website on August 26, 2026, the city has unveiled its "15th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Strategic Emerging Industries" (referred to as "the Plan"). Under this blueprint, Shanghai will operate within the broader framework of its modern industrial system during the 2026-2030 period, focusing on enhancing the strategic leadership of its three pioneering industries, expanding 12 specific sub-sectors within emerging pillar industries, positioning 10 frontier technologies for future growth, and nurturing eight new types of service business models within strategic emerging sectors. The ultimate goal is to establish a strategic emerging industry cluster with significant international influence.

Simultaneously, the Plan outlines the deployment of new sub-sector tracks and frontier technology directions for emerging pillar industries. It encourages all districts to leverage their unique resource advantages to build specialized industrial parks for strategic emerging sectors, fostering a spatially balanced development pattern that is both distinctive and synergistically coordinated. By 2030, the value-added output of strategic emerging industries is projected to reach 2.1 trillion yuan, with the total output of industrial strategic emerging sectors accounting for over 50% of the total output of large-scale industries. Additionally, the average annual growth rate of the three pioneering manufacturing industries is expected to exceed 10%.

To strengthen the strategic leadership capacity of the three pioneering industries, the Plan specifies targeted measures. In the field of integrated circuits, efforts will concentrate on bolstering forward-looking deployment in key areas to comprehensively elevate the industry's overall capability. Key development priorities include: 1) High-end chips and AI-empowered design, accelerating the R&D and industrialization of advanced chips while establishing vertical-specific design models and intelligent agents to reshape design processes and accelerate simulation through AI; 2) Advanced packaging, promoting R&D and mass adoption of new technologies like advanced packaging, along with supporting equipment and material development; and 3) Novel devices and new architecture chips, supporting R&D of new material devices such as two-dimensional materials and advancing the design and tape-out of three-dimensional stacked architecture chips.

In the biopharmaceutical sector, the Plan emphasizes accelerating the development and cultivation of innovative drugs with significant intellectual property value. This includes establishing a discovery and selection mechanism for innovative drugs, enhancing AI model-assisted predictions of clinical success rates, and leveraging high-quality medical and clinical research cohort data to support drug development and translation. Key areas of focus are: 1) High-clinical-value innovative drugs, applying AI in target discovery, molecule generation, and efficacy simulation while supporting research and translation of novel mechanism drugs like multifunctional antibodies, universal cells, and protein-targeted degradation; 2) Intelligent high-end medical devices, supporting development of miniaturized proton radiotherapy equipment, flexible surgical robots, and tackling key components and materials challenges; and 3) High-end pharmaceutical R&D and medical services, supporting contract research organizations (CROs) in building AI-assisted drug development models and automated laboratories, while encouraging contract development and manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) to adopt advanced continuous flow processes. The Plan also aims to improve convenience in international medical insurance settlement and patient care procedures.

For artificial intelligence, the Plan proposes constructing a "chip-model-cloud" ecosystem. This involves building a full-stack technology validation platform, developing a unified middleware software stack based on domain-specific languages, and establishing a general AI-driven scientific research foundation platform along with AI evaluation infrastructure. Development priorities include: 1) Large models and intelligent agents, advancing capabilities in ultra-long context processing and native multimodality, tackling high-quality corpus processing and synthesis technologies, and creating general-purpose agent foundations for autonomous learning and efficient collaboration—deepening intelligent applications in government services and professional sectors while training frontier deployment engineer (FDE) teams; 2) AI for Science, constructing interdisciplinary, multimodal knowledge reasoning models that integrate general and specialized knowledge to accelerate scientific discovery across life sciences, materials, and physics; 3) Embodied intelligence, overcoming core algorithm challenges in long-horizon planning and dexterous manipulation, building world models with high causality aligned with physical laws, and establishing a physical AI algorithm system with virtual-real embodied training grounds; and 4) Intelligent computing industry systems, tackling technologies such as optoelectronic hybrid communication, memory-computing synergy optimization, and prefill-decoding separation to build a cloud-intelligent fusion Token cloud service industry system.

The Plan also details the expansion of sub-sector tracks within emerging pillar industries, encompassing new intelligent terminals, blockchain, industrial software, intelligent connected new energy vehicles, intelligent robots, civil aviation, commercial space and satellite internet, low-altitude economy, shipbuilding and marine engineering, new energy storage and energy equipment, high-end scientific instruments, and advanced materials. Furthermore, it outlines agile deployment of frontier technologies for the future, including quantum technology, brain-computer interfaces, nuclear fusion energy, sixth-generation mobile communications (6G), brain-inspired intelligence, optical computing, fourth-generation semiconductors, biomanufacturing, cell and gene therapy, and green fuels.