BARCELONA, Spain, Nov. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC), the leading international event on cities and smart urban solutions organized by Fira de Barcelona, closed its fifteenth edition this afternoon with 29.721 attendees from 140 countries gathered at the Gran Via venue. Under the theme "Urban Solutions, Real Impact", the congress showed that the technologies cities have been committed to already make an impact on today's most pressing urban challenges. This year's main topics included the affordable housing, climate change abatement solutions and mobility.
The program, structured around seven tracks, brought together 668 international experts and representatives of over 1,000 cities. Among the speakers were Anne Hidalgo, Andre Dickens, Anacláudia Rossbach, Nikolas Badminton and Ayumi Moore Aoki.
SCEWC was held together with Tomorrow.Mobility World Congress – organized with EIT Urban Mobility, HOWS Barcelona, Tomorrow.Blue Economy, the Barcelona Deep Tech Summit and the Barcelona Cybersecurity Congress, gathering 1,276 exhibitors such as Dell Technologies, Deutsche Telekom IoT, Esri, FCC Enviro, Google, Hanwha Vision, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Ubiwhere, Urbio and Veolia.
"Three days ago, we set out to show that smart city initiatives are already making an impact. Having welcomed over 27,000 attendees and 1,276 exhibitors, and having brought together mayors, companies and experts who are delivering results all over the world, we can affirm that the message from cities has been clear: they are ready and willing to scale what works and we are ready to help them speed the process," said Ugo Valenti, Director of Smart City Expo World Congress.
Cities Programme
SCEWC hosted an agenda of activities under the name Cities Programme, jointly organized with the Barcelona City Council, focused on the exchange of strategies and knowledge among municipal leaders. The programme featured the Housing Mayors Meeting and the City Peers meetings, among other activities.
World Smart City Awards
The Japanese capital was awarded as "Smart City of 2026" at the World Smart City Awards, which acknowledge every year the most outstanding initiatives and projects in the urban transformation industry. The Jury granted the City Award to Tokyo, through its Bureau of Digital Services, for "C³ Powering Tokyo", a model that puts residents at the center of its digital and AI transformation.
Smart City Expo World Congress will return to Fira de Barcelona's Gran Via venue for its sixteenth edition on November 2 - 4, 2027.
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Smart City Expo 2026 closes after showing the real impact of urban solutions
BEIJING, Nov. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ --A news report from China Daily:
The 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit concluded on Thursday after a four-day run. Beyond Wuzhen, a profound transformation driven by artificial intelligence is underway in Zhejiang's workshops, laboratories and daily life. Building on years of efforts to deepen the Digital Zhejiang initiative, the province is aiming to become a hub of AI innovation.
In the first eight months, revenue of enterprises above designated size in Zhejiang's core AI industry reached 582.87 billion yuan ($87.2 billion), up 26.9 percent year-on-year. The number of core industry enterprises rose to 2,112, forming a full industry-chain layout spanning chips, large models, intelligent agents and application services.
Computing power is one of the key infrastructure pillars of Zhejiang's AI development. At a sock factory workshop in Zhuji, a designer can generate 20 original patterns within three minutes. In Yiwu, traders rely on an AI computing platform to produce high-definition product images and marketing short videos with a single click.
Powering these AI application scenarios is a province-wide integrated computing network built by China Mobile's Zhejiang branch.
As of the end of September, Zhejiang's total computing power reached 197 EFLOPS (short for ExaFLOPS, a unit of computing performance that quantifies the number of floating-point operations a computer can perform per second), ranking among the highest in the country. Of this, 54 enterprises and institutions in the province received national computing-power vouchers totaling 408 million yuan, accounting for 37 percent of the national total.
"As the Hangzhou and Jiashan intelligent computing centers are put into operation, Zhejiang can achieve millisecond-level access to computing, integrated computing-network scheduling and one-stop security assurance," said Qiu Xiaoyuan, a manager at China Mobile's Zhejiang branch.
Large models are another key factor to the game. With the Qwen and DeepSeek large models iterating continuously, Zhejiang's model ecosystem aims to take the leading position.
In the 2026 government work report of Zhejiang, the province proposed the goal of gaining a leading position in AI development and striving to build a high-quality open-source ecosystem. Open source has been listed as one of the core levers of the province's AI strategy.
Located in Xihu district, Hangzhou, the ModelScope community is among China's largest AI open-source communities. Online, it brings together more than 29 million AI developers and more than 200,000 models worldwide, lowering the threshold for AI-related innovation.
Chen Tianrun, born after 2000, is a doctoral student at Zhejiang University and founder of Moxin Technology, which independently developed MoWorld, a real-time interactive world model built entirely on domestic neural processing units. An NPU is a specialized computer microprocessor designed to mimic the processing function of the human brain.
"The relationship between AI and humans is not about AI replacing humans, but about AI and humans working together to do more to raise productivity," Chen said.
Backed by new production factors such as computing power, models and data, Zhejiang is breaking through its natural-resource constraints to become a trendsetter in innovation.
The Zhejiang provincial government hosted a series of major events during the 2026 WIC Wuzhen Summit, featuring interactive experiences and surprises.
On Monday, at the Light of Internet Expo, a signature event of the WIC Wuzhen Summit, more than 30 embodied-intelligence robots — from companies such as AgiBot, UBTech, Unitree and Zhongke Fifth Era — brought visitors to the world of perceptual intelligence.
Among them, the world's first bipedal humanoid robot capable of playing badminton with humans autonomously became the centerpiece. The robot has also mastered table tennis; the faster the ball travels, the faster it reacts.
The Global Internet Competition of "Straight to Wuzhen" is another highlight event of the WIC Wuzhen Summit. Since registration opened in June, it has attracted 1,347 projects and one-person company entries from 31 countries and regions.
The Digital Economy Industrial Cooperation Conference held on Wednesday was a signature event of the Wuzhen Summit's permanent venue. Over the past three years, annual signings of digital economy industrial projects at the event have each exceeded 100 billion yuan.
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Zhejiang aims to be highland of AI innovation
