China’s MIIT Unveils Action Plan to Support AI Startups and AtomGit Ecosystem
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has issued an action plan for 2026–2028 to accelerate the growth of AI startups and small businesses. The plan aims to cultivate over 10,000 innovative small and medium enterprises, more than 2,000 specialized "Little Giant" firms, and significantly expand the national AtomGit open-source platform. This initiative seeks to strengthen China's domestic AI infrastructure and technology sovereignty by lowering operational barriers for AI startups through subsidized compute power and open datasets. By promoting AtomGit and supporting micro-entities like "one-person companies" and AI agent creators, China aims to build a self-sustaining open-source ecosystem independent of foreign platforms. The policy mandates pooled, elastic computing resources via the China Computing Power Platform, alongside edge computing development to enhance network-compute integration. Furthermore, it encourages cross-industry data alliances in manufacturing and biomedicine to open curated datasets to startups while prompting developers to contribute open-source models directly to AtomGit.
## BACKGROUND
AtomGit is China's national open-source code hosting platform operated by the OpenAtom Foundation, serving as a domestic alternative to foreign services such as GitHub. Additionally, computing-network convergence (CNC) refers to unifying networking and compute resource management to enable dynamic service allocation and low-latency processing for emerging AI workloads.