How China’s State‑Owned Giants Are Accelerating AI with DeepSeek

In the current wave of digitalization, artificial intelligence has become a core driver of transformation across industries. Chinese state‑owned and central enterprises, as pillars of the national economy, are seizing AI strategic opportunities and accelerating intelligent transformation.

According to iFenxi data, by February 21, 45% of central enterprises had completed deployment of the DeepSeek model, achieving a rapid, large‑scale rollout of an open‑source model that was previously unimaginable.

Energy sector breakthroughs include the three major oil companies—China National Petroleum, China Petroleum & Chemical, and China National Offshore Oil—each completing private deployments of DeepSeek, showcasing strong momentum in the industry’s smart transformation.

China National Petroleum : Its Kunlun model has been privatized with DeepSeek, adding deep‑reasoning capabilities and a “deep thinking” mode that enhances knowledge inference and scenario understanding.

China Petroleum & Chemical : Completed full‑size deployment of DeepSeek on a domestic compute platform and integrated it with the Great Wall model application system, strengthening model autonomy and illustrating deep AI‑compute integration.

China National Offshore Oil : Deployed the full DeepSeek‑R1 671B series (including distilled versions) privately, exposing APIs to ERP, the oil‑company mall and other business applications, marking a major step in intelligent business collaboration.

Power industry adoption sees State Grid and China Southern Power Grid integrating DeepSeek via model‑service clouds, enabling precise demand interpretation, extreme interaction experiences, intelligent defect prevention, performance optimization and automated documentation, thereby boosting R&D efficiency and cutting costs.

China National Power: Launched the “Smart Little Energy” AI assistant and the “iHN+” mobile portal, enhancing daily operations and decision‑making.

Telecommunications have all three major operators integrating DeepSeek:

China Mobile : Fully integrated DeepSeek‑R1, providing dedicated compute solutions for intelligent customer service and cloud scenarios.

China Telecom : Tianyi Cloud became the first domestic provider to support DeepSeek‑R1, building a WebUI research assistant that improves academic resource retrieval and literature analysis.

China Unicom : Adapted DeepSeek‑R1 on the “Xingluo” platform for cloud desktops and programming assistants, delivering out‑of‑the‑box usage experiences.

Construction and infrastructure enterprises are also exploring AI applications:

China Railway First Bureau : Completed local deployment of DeepSeek‑R1, enabling internal intelligent assistants for procedures and craftsmanship.

China Railway Tenth Bureau : Deployed large language models on local servers, ensuring data stays within the domain for security and providing natural‑language query capabilities.

China Energy Engineering : Integrated DeepSeek series across platforms, embedding the “Energy AI” assistant to fully empower digital transformation.