Intelligent connected vehicle (ICV) deployments in the Yangtze River Delta Integration Demonstration Zone are moving beyond core urban districts and extending into county-level units.
Recently, Zhejiang Mobile won the bid for the Jiashan County intelligent connected autonomous driving integration project, with a total project value exceeding CNY 104 million. As 5G-A, BeiDou high-precision positioning, and L4-level autonomous driving are deeply integrated, Jiashan, a node county at the intersection of Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, is becoming a new testing ground for China Mobile's integrated capabilities in communications, computing power, and intelligence.
This is not an ordinary system integration deal. From deploying unmanned vehicles on public roads to support from an intelligent computing center, and further to vehicle-road-cloud integrated global scheduling, China Mobile aims to turn Jiashan into a replicable model for smart transportation in county-level areas of the Yangtze River Delta, using an integrated communications-computing-intelligence foundation to unlock broader lower-tier market opportunities.
1. Full-Domain Scenario Coverage: Livelihood Applications from Commuting to Sanitation
Jiashan is located at the core of the Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang border and is the National Intelligent Connected Vehicle Zhejiang Jiashan Demonstration Zone. It has traffic nodes such as Jiashan South high-speed railway station and Xitang Scenic Area, as well as industrial carriers such as Xiangfudang Science and Innovation Green Valley and Yaozhuang Industrial Park, with outstanding scenario complexity and representativeness.
This project covers urban and rural areas across Jiashan and includes construction, testing, and up to eight years of operation and maintenance services. From the outset, the overall solution has targeted a deployable and scalable standard pathway for county-level intelligent connected vehicles, rather than a one-off demonstration project.
The specific deployment scenarios are concentrated in two major livelihood areas.
One is public mobility. Twelve 8.5-meter L4-level autonomous driving mid-size buses will be deployed, with four bus routes planned to connect core nodes such as Xitang Bus Terminal, Xiangfudang Science and Innovation Green Valley, Jiashan South high-speed railway station, and Yaozhuang Town Government, focusing on bridging the last mile of commuter shuttles between industrial parks, new urban areas, and transportation hubs.
The other is urban sanitation. Four 5-ton-class autonomous washing and sweeping vehicles and four 1.5-ton-class unmanned road sweepers will be configured, with three sanitation routes implemented to cover Luoxing Subdistrict, Weitang Subdistrict, and the Xiangfudang Demonstration Zone, enabling fully unmanned integrated operations for road sweeping and high-pressure washing.
All vehicles are new energy pure electric vehicles. Citizens can later use WeChat mini programs to query routes, view real-time vehicle locations, and book rides, with the user experience seamlessly integrated with conventional public services.
2. Local Computing Power Closed Loop: The Intelligent Computing Center Provides the Confidence for Vehicle Operations
What runs on the road are unmanned vehicles, but what truly determines system stability and response speed is the invisible computing power foundation behind them.
The core supporting this intelligent connected system is exactly the China Mobile Yangtze River Delta Jiashan Intelligent Computing Center, which has just completed its first acceptance and delivery.
The first phase of this intelligent computing center has a total investment of approximately CNY 5 billion and plans a 50,000-card-class intelligent computing cluster. Its initial computing power scale reaches 15000 PFlops, capable of supporting heavy computing tasks such as training large models with hundreds of billions of parameters, AI inference, and industrial simulation. Relying on a 400G optical transmission network, it can build ultra-low latency circles of 20 ms nationwide, 5 ms within the province, and 1 ms at the city level, linking computing power nodes across Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Anhui and integrating into the national integrated computing power network.
For the Jiashan autonomous driving project, L4-level algorithm iteration, vehicle-road-cloud collaborative decision-making, and global scheduling of unmanned sanitation vehicles can all complete a computing power closed loop locally, achieving true millisecond-level response while ensuring the security and controllability of operational data.
3. Vehicle-Road-Cloud Integration: Jiashan Is a County-Level Move in the National Chess Game
The implementation of the Jiashan project is not an isolated single-point breakthrough, but the concentrated realization of China Mobile's multi-year deployment in the vehicle-road-cloud integration track.
As China Mobile's core R&D force in the transportation sector, the Shanghai Industrial Research Institute provides the complete vehicle-road-cloud integration technology foundation, has built and operates the largest 5G+V2X converged vehicle-road communication network in China, and is also an excellent pilot unit for building a strong transportation country.
Before this, China Mobile had already validated vehicle-road-cloud solutions in different models across multiple cities. In Wuxi, it implemented China's first citywide, network-wide, fully covered vehicle-road-cloud integration project, reducing computing and network infrastructure costs by nearly 46% compared with traditional solutions through large-scale low-cost deployment; in Shiyan, it established the industry's first vehicle-road-cloud joint venture with Dongfeng Motor to explore market-oriented operating paths for commercial logistics vehicles.
Jiashan's positioning is a county-level model in this full-domain chess game. Leveraging the demonstration zone's policy advantages, local intelligent computing hub capabilities, and real autonomous driving scenarios, China Mobile aims to complete the full closed loop here from communications-computing-intelligence empowerment to scenario deployment and industry-driven development.
4. Beyond Running Vehicles: Three Values Open County-Level Market Space
The value of a CNY 100 million-level county project has never been limited to simply getting a few unmanned vehicles running.
First is livelihood value. Shortcomings in county-level public transportation are widespread, and shuttle connections between industrial parks and hubs as well as urban-rural route coverage are long-standing pain points. The deployment of autonomous driving buses and unmanned sanitation services fills the service gap in urban-rural public transportation and innovates traditional sanitation operating models, with ordinary citizens as the most direct beneficiaries.
Second is industrial value. Real road condition data continuously generated on open roads are the scarcest core resources for intelligent connected vehicle enterprises. As the project continues to operate, it will gradually attract upstream and downstream industrial chain enterprises to settle in Jiashan, forming a positive cycle from testing and demonstration to industrial incubation and empowering the upgrade of the local intelligent IoT industrial cluster.
More importantly is industry value. Currently, most domestic intelligent connected vehicle projects are concentrated in first- and second-tier major cities, while county-level large-scale deployment cases are very scarce. Many projects also emphasize construction over operation, lacking continuous O&M capability after completion and making replication and promotion difficult. The Jiashan project covers a complete construction period plus eight years of long-cycle operation, solving the issue of operational sustainability from the outset and effectively providing a referenceable standard template for county-level intelligent connected vehicle development in the Yangtze River Delta and even nationwide.
5. A Microcosm of Operator Transformation: From Network Service Provider to Full-Chain Service Provider
The winning bid for the Jiashan project also sends a clear industry signal: the competitive logic of smart transportation has changed.
In past projects, clients focused more on single-vehicle hardware performance; today's clients increasingly value foundational infrastructure capabilities, end-to-end integration delivery, and long-term stable operational support.
This is precisely where operators have advantages. Full-domain 5G coverage, BeiDou high-precision positioning capabilities, and localized 7x24-hour service systems enable operators to transition from mere network service providers to comprehensive smart transportation service providers across the full chain.
China Mobile is following exactly this path. With communications as the foundation, computing power as the support, and intelligence as the empowerment, the comprehensive capability formed by the fusion of the three creates a barrier that is difficult for a single equipment vendor or solution provider to replicate.
As unmanned buses pass through the science and innovation park at Xiangfudang, unmanned sanitation vehicles shuttle through county streets, and the intelligent computing center supports every millisecond-level decision in the background, the smart transportation picture of Jiashan is gradually becoming clear.
This is only the beginning. As this county-level model is validated, the communications-computing-intelligence integrated smart transportation solution will have significant replication potential in more counties in the Yangtze River Delta and even nationwide.
We will continue to track the project's construction progress, focusing on key milestones such as the deployment of the cloud control platform and real-vehicle road testing, to see what results this county-level model can ultimately achieve.