We don't just read policy documents; we decode the power structures embedded within them. Last week, Chengdu released its 'AI+' action plan, targeting a 260 billion yuan (about $36 billion) industrial scale by 2027, with 70% of smart terminals and agents running AI. The press release sounds like a typical government blueprint—ambitious, numbers-driven, and completely silent on the one thing that could make it sustainable: trustless, decentralized infrastructure.
As a Web3 community founder who has spent the last six years analyzing token distributions and governance failures, I’ve seen this pattern before. Centralized planners set aggressive targets, pour subsidies into a few handpicked players, and then wonder why the system collapses when the funding stops. Chengdu’s plan is no different. It’s a top-down fantasy that ignores every lesson crypto has painfully learned about resilience, permissionless innovation, and the dangers of single points of failure.
The Context: What Chengdu Is Really Building
The plan focuses on 'scenario-driven' deployment across manufacturing, finance, healthcare, and education. They’ll create 100 'innovation products' and 100 'demonstration scenes' annually. The implicit roadmap: use government procurement to kickstart demand, let local giants like Huawei and Alibaba integrate their AI stacks, and hope the ecosystem self-sustains by 2030. The tech stack? Unclear. The ethical framework? Non-existent. The computing power? Dependent on a few centralized data centers—Tianfu Smart Computing Center and Chengdu Supercomputing Center—both state-controlled.
From my experience auditing DeFi protocols during the 2022 bear market, I learned that centralization isn’t just a philosophical flaw—it’s a systemic risk. When a single entity controls the sequencer, the treasury, or the compute layer, you get rent extraction, censorship, and eventual collapse. Chengdu’s AI plan replicates this exact architecture at a city scale. The 'smart terminals' will likely require proprietary firmware, the agents will run on permissioned APIs, and the data will flow through state-owned pipelines. Sound familiar? It’s the same Web2 walled garden—just with more neural networks.
The Core: A Data-Driven Critique of Chengdu’s Centralized Bet
Let’s break down the numbers. 260 billion yuan by 2027 implies a compound annual growth rate of over 30%. For context, the global AI market grows at around 15%. To achieve double that, Chengdu is betting on aggressive government stimulus and, more concerning, statistical reclassification. In my 2020 DeFi Summer analysis, I noticed how protocols inflated their TVL by counting idle funds multiple times. The same trick is at play here: the 260 billion figure likely includes 'traditional products with AI features'—a smart doorbell becomes an AI terminal, a car with lane assist becomes an AI agent. The real new AI value might be a fraction of that.
Worse, the plan lacks any decentralized verification mechanism. How will they measure 'penetration rate'? Who audits the claims? In crypto, we use on-chain data, oracle networks, and zero-knowledge proofs to verify metrics. Chengdu’s plan relies on self-reporting from companies hungry for subsidies. We don’t need to guess how that ends—I’ve seen it happen with liquidity mining rewards where projects faked user numbers to farm tokens.
Then there’s the compute bottleneck. The plan requires massive inference and training capacity, but the local data centers are limited by energy quotas and chip export controls. The inevitable result: a few large companies will hoard the subsidized compute, while startups and independent developers get priced out. Contrast this with decentralized compute networks like Akash or Golem, where anyone can contribute GPU cycles and anyone can buy them permissionlessly. Chengdu’s approach creates an artificial scarcity that stifles the very innovation they claim to foster.
The Contrarian: Could Blockchain Actually Save Chengdu’s Plan?
Here’s the counterintuitive twist: despite my criticism, Chengdu’s scenario-driven approach is exactly where blockchain could thrive—if they’d let it. The plan’s focus on 'agents' and 'smart terminals' maps directly onto the crypto vision of autonomous, verifiable entities. Imagine if every smart terminal in Chengdu had a blockchain identity, a soulbound token verifying its firmware, and a mechanism to pay for compute in real-time via micropayments. That’s not science fiction; projects like Fetch.ai and Bittensor are already doing this.
But the government won’t adopt permissionless systems because they can’t control them. The real contrarian angle: the most valuable AI applications in Chengdu will not come from the official 'demonstration scenes' but from the underground crypto-native developer community. I’ve seen this happen in Buenos Aires—while the city was pushing centralized smart city initiatives, local hackers were building peer-to-peer energy trading grids on Ethereum. The official plan will build the roads; the crypto community will build the highways.
Freedom isn't a target number; it's the ability to opt out. Chengdu’s plan forces compliance—you will be a 'smart terminal' whether you like it or not. A blockchain alternative would let users choose to participate, to contribute compute, to own their AI-generated data. That’s the missing piece: user sovereignty.
The Takeaway: Infrastructure Is Ideology
Every line of code, every data center location, every subsidy program encodes a set of values. Chengdu’s AI plan encodes centralization, state control, and permissioned access. It will generate impressive top-line numbers, just like centralized exchanges did before FTX collapsed. But it won’t create the resilient, antifragile AI ecosystem that the world needs. That will come from communities that build in public, verify on-chain, and reward contributors transparently.
Chengdu could have been a testbed for decentralized AI governance. Instead, it’s a monument to old thinking. The future of AI isn’t a government committee setting penetration targets. It’s thousands of independent agents verified by cryptographic proofs, running on global, permissionless networks. ’s built by our shared vision.
