Gansu Digital Human Timeline

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Gansu Province is actively integrating digital human technologies across multiple sectors, including government, education, healthcare, tourism, culture, and employment services. County-level media centers have begun using AI news anchors, and cities like Dunhuang and Zhangye have implemented AI-driven public services using large language models such as DeepSeek. Gansu’s digital economy strategy emphasizes intelligent virtual employees, digital tour guides, and virtual historical figures to enhance tourism and cultural preservation. The province has launched digital human initiatives in vocational colleges, libraries, and museums, including interactive teaching systems, virtual AI librarians, and digital cultural ambassadors like “Gan Tao Tao” and “Weak Water.” Digital humans are also used in live-streamed job recruitment, smart healthcare (e.g., AI nurses), and public legal education. Gansu’s participation in the national “East Data West Computing” project further supports digital infrastructure development, while partnerships with major telecom companies help drive AI deployment in rural and urban areas.

The “East Data, West Computing” project is a national strategy launched by China in 2022 to address the imbalance in data center distribution between the eastern and western regions. It redirects massive volumes of data from the densely populated, economically advanced eastern areas to newly built data centers in the energy-rich, less-developed western provinces such as Gansu, Guizhou, Ningxia, and Qinghai. This initiative is designed to optimize national computing resources, alleviate energy and land shortages in the east, promote clean energy usage in the west, and enhance the country’s overall digital infrastructure.

Qingyang is a prefecture-level city located in the eastern part of Gansu Province, China. It serves as a strategic hub in China’s “East Data, West Computing” initiative due to its geographic position, stable climate, and access to renewable energy resources. Historically part of the Loess Plateau region, Qingyang plays a growing role in the digital economy through the development of data centers and intelligent computing infrastructure, particularly under national policies aimed at rebalancing computing power and digital infrastructure from coastal to inland areas.

Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province in northwest China, has become an emerging hub for digital human development and application. A growing number of projects, institutions, and companies in the city are integrating AI-generated virtual humans across sectors including education, healthcare, broadcasting, employment services, tourism, e-commerce, and public administration. Highlights include the establishment of the Nexthuman joint digital human delivery base for northwest China, AI hosts for livestreaming job recruitment events, virtual tour guides embedded with local cultural IP, and digital anatomy systems in medical education. Lanzhou’s universities, such as Lanzhou University and Lanzhou University of Finance and Economics, are also actively deploying virtual humans in teaching and research.