July 31, 2026 (InvestinChina.asia) – China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said Thursday (July 30, 2026) that building out the national computing-power network during the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026–2030) will require roughly 4 trillion yuan of new direct investment, with corporate spending—especially from private players—expected to carry most of the load. The figure, cited by NDRC spokesperson Jiang Yi at the commission’s July press conference, frames computing infrastructure as both a demand-side stabilizer and a gateway for private capital at a moment when Beijing is leaning on “stock-plus-incremental” policy to hold growth near target.
The 4 trillion yuan ticket is only one slice of a broader “six networks” push—water, new-type power grids, computing power, next-generation communications, urban underground pipelines, and logistics—that the NDRC is marketing as a coordinated domestic-demand engine rather than six parallel build-outs. Jiang stressed “multi-network synergy, hardware-software synergy, and scenario synergy,” warning against fragmented execution and promising that plans will be translated into “real physical workload” with money “spent where it counts.”
Scale and Private Capital
Beyond computing power, the NDRC put 15th-plan direct investment in new power grids above 5 trillion yuan and underground pipeline upgrades around 5 trillion yuan, the latter targeting gas, drainage, heating and flood-resilience gaps in city systems. In the first half of 2026, modern water-network projects already drew more than 10.8 billion yuan of private capital, up 85.8% year on year. Jiang said the commission will roll out more projects with stable operating returns to pull private firms in, while offering planning guidance and factor guarantees for computing-network builders.
AI Base Layer Is Already Moving
The NDRC used the same briefing to sketch the demand behind the 4 trillion yuan: as of end-June, national intelligent-computing capacity was 2.8 times the year-earlier level, the first fully domestic 100,000-card AI cluster has entered service, and more than 120,000 high-quality datasets are live. Domestic open-source models from DeepSeek and Moonshot (Kimi) have crossed 10 billion cumulative global downloads, and AI-related sectors are running above 30% growth. The commission pledged to accelerate the Artificial Intelligence Law, stand up national AI application pilot bases, push “model-chip-cloud-use” stack alignment, and build technical monitoring and emergency-response systems for model risk.
Anti-Involution and Unified Market
On the supply side, the NDRC repeated the Politburo’s “anti-involution” line with operational detail: a combination of “one regulation, three lists, three systems” to bound local government promotional behavior, plus capacity control, standard-setting, price enforcement and quality supervision to break low-price disorderly competition. The unified national market, Jiang said, is a “protracted battle,” not a one-off cleanup.
Robotics, Belt and Road, Demand Plan
Two peripheral data points rounded out the briefing: 8 of every 10 humanoid and quadruped robots sold globally now come from China; and Belt and Road goods trade reached 12.97 trillion yuan in H1 2026, up 14.8% and 50.9% of total Chinese foreign trade, with investment flowing toward high-tech and green-low-carbon assets. The NDRC also confirmed it is drafting an Expanding Domestic Demand Strategy Implementation Plan (2026–2030) with “greater force and more concrete measures.”
Reading the Signal
Read together with the July 30 Politburo meeting, the NDRC briefing converts the Bureau’s “force-with-efficacy” mantra into line items: 4 trillion yuan for compute, 10 trillion yuan combined for grids and pipes, private capital invited on stable-return terms, and AI governance legislated in parallel with build-out. It is a supply-heavy answer to a demand-softening problem—asset-heavy, state-steered, but explicitly dependent on private balance sheets to clear.