Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu used a high-profile appearance at the South China Morning Post China Conference 2026 on July 7 to frame artificial intelligence as the defining priority of the city’s economic strategy for the next five years. Speaking at an event titled “Intelligence at Scale: Hong Kong’s AI-Powered Future” that was attended by about 500 business executives and regulators, Lee referred to AI as “a central plank” in Hong Kong’s growth as a global hub for innovation and technology.
This language indicates a purposeful elevation of AI from one policy priority among many to the organizing principle of the city’s economic transformation. The conference served as a platform for Lee to preview the city’s first-ever five-year development blueprint, currently in a two-month public consultation phase and scheduled for publication in the third quarter of 2026. The blueprint aligns with China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, which runs from 2026 to 2030 and places AI development at the center of the country’s economic modernization agenda.
The Infrastructure Behind the Ambition
Hong Kong’s AI ambitions are backed by concrete institutional and financial commitments that distinguish the city’s strategy from aspirational policy statements. The government has deployed a HK$3 billion AI subsidy scheme that has already supported nearly 30 projects across sectors including finance, healthcare, and logistics.
The Hong Kong Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Institute, a government-backed body designed to bridge academic research and commercial application, is scheduled to begin operations in the second half of 2026.cThe city’s geographic position within the Greater Bay Area gives it a structural advantage that Lee carefully highlighted.
The Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou innovation cluster has been ranked first among the world’s 100 leading innovation clusters by the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index, a designation that reflects the concentration of manufacturing capacity in Shenzhen, research talent in Guangzhou, and financial and legal infrastructure in Hong Kong. For AI companies seeking to operate across the mainland-international divide, Hong Kong’s common law system, free capital flows, and access to mainland data and supply chains make it a uniquely positioned hub.
Strategic Enterprises and the Northern Metropolis
Since 2022, 124 companies that Hong Kong classifies as “strategic enterprises”, spanning advanced manufacturing, new energy, AI, data science, fintech, and life sciences, have established a presence in the city. These companies are expected to invest a combined HK$73 billion and create approximately 25,000 jobs. InvestHK, the government’s inward investment agency, assisted 560 mainland and overseas companies in setting up or expanding in Hong Kong in 2025, a 4 percent increase over the prior year.
The physical infrastructure to support this expansion is taking shape in the Northern Metropolis, a 30,000-hectare development zone near the mainland border, designed to provide the land and facilities that Hong Kong’s dense urban core cannot. The Northern Metropolis is intended to host research institutions, technology parks, and manufacturing facilities that can operate in close proximity to Shenzhen’s supply chains while remaining under Hong Kong’s legal and regulatory framework.
(Related: Hong Kong and Mainland China Will Start Sharing Data This Year)
Positioning Between East and West
Hong Kong’s AI strategy is also shaped by its role as a bridge between Chinese and international capital markets. The city’s stock exchange has become the primary listing venue for China’s AI and chip companies, with firms including Z.ai, MiniMax, and Biren Technology raising billions through Hong Kong IPOs in 2026. The concentration of AI listings has given Hong Kong a financial ecosystem increasingly oriented toward AI infrastructure, a dynamic that Lee’s blueprint is designed to reinforce.
The conference itself was a demonstration of that positioning. By hosting the event under an AI-focused theme and inviting both mainland and international participants, the SCMP and the Hong Kong government were signaling that the city intends to be a convening point for the global AI conversation, not merely a passive beneficiary of mainland China’s AI expansion. The SCMP announced at the conference that it will host its next China Conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, in September 2026, extending the format to a region where Chinese AI influence is growing rapidly.
For investors and technology companies assessing where to anchor their Asia operations, Hong Kong’s combination of AI-specific subsidies, a new research institute, a pipeline of strategic enterprise investments, and proximity to the world’s most active AI manufacturing and development ecosystem makes it a more compelling proposition than it was even two years ago.
The challenge for Hong Kong is to convert that positioning into durable competitive advantage before rival hubs such as Singapore, Dubai, and Tokyo can offer comparable combinations of talent, capital, and regulatory clarity. Singapore has moved aggressively to attract AI companies with its National AI Strategy 2.0 and a series of compute subsidies, while Tokyo has benefited from SoftBank’s $100 billion AI infrastructure commitment.
Hong Kong’s edge lies in its unique legal and financial integration with the mainland, but sustaining that edge requires the kind of consistent policy execution that the five-year blueprint is designed to provide. The two-month public consultation period, which closes before the blueprint’s Q3 publication date, will be a test of whether the government can translate the ambition Lee articulated at the SCMP conference into a document that gives investors and companies the certainty they need to make long-term commitments.