On a weekday morning, Liu Jiacheng pushes open the door of a spaceship-like retail shop, checks inventory line by line, inspects a robot colleague and prepares to open for the day.

He is one of many young people who have moved to the Gui'an New Area, Guizhou province, to work in the district's growing digital and intelligent industries.

The shop sits on the new district's civic center square. When someone wants to buy something, the robot turns around, picks up the item, and hands it to the customer.

Local media said Liu manages the sci-fi-themed store and lives in the district's "one-year for free" talent apartment program for recent college graduates. It was his first stop after graduation.

"It's three metro stops to work, convenient and lively. I chose Gui'an for its momentum. I'm already planning to renew when the year is up," he said.

The official free-stay program offers 2,364 units for fresh graduates. Officials said 4,016 young people have moved in so far.

Under the latest rules, graduates who complete one year may apply to extend their stay. Those already working or starting a business in the district can extend their stay by up to one year. Those not yet employed receive a buffer period of up to three months.

From the one-year free housing to later rental subsidies, Gui'an's residential policies aim to cover the full career lifecycle of young professionals — from new graduates and startup founders to established workers.

Public security records show the district added 22,300 new permanent residents in 2025.

To feed industry growth, the local government partnered with Guizhou University and Guizhou Normal University to open digital-economy training centers. The program has produced and placed more than 5,000 big-data specialists.

Gui'an's digital sector, led by bigdata operations, has expanded rapidly. The district has attracted 27 major data centers, including facilities run by Huawei, Tencent and Apple, plus the three national telecom carriers.

Total computing capacity in the district has surpassed 160 EFLOPS, with more than 98 percent of that reported as intelligent computing.

EFLOPS is a unit of the speed of computer systems, equal to one quintillion floating-point operations per second.

Those resources are helping make Gui'an one of China's most concentrated hubs for domestically sourced intelligent computing.

The information industry's growth is already visible in everyday services and creative work. Huawei Cloud has established operations in the district and deployed 105 super-nodes to provide large-scale training and inference services.

Gui'an's supercomputing center has become the largest single-site film-rendering facility in Southwest China, supplying computing for more than 160 film projects, including The Wandering Earth 2 and Ne Zha 2, thereby boosting domestic visual-effects capacity.

Graduates like Liu, industry specialists and companies from across China are converging on the fast-growing new city in search of opportunity.

One new arrival is Guian New Area VMR Technology Co, a robotics firm from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, that moved in at the end of 2024 and has launched several products, including perception-enabled head modules.

According to its official website, the company mainly provides humanoid robots and their core components and is a supplier to BYD, a Chinese automaker.

"The global robotics industry is moving toward embodied intelligence, which requires massive computing resources for training," said Guo Di, R&D director at VMR. "We were drawn by the district's growing data-industry cluster. The computer here will likely be used for our future robot training, and with relatively low labor costs, we chose Gui'an."

Local officials say the next steps are to build a data ecosystem around high-quality datasets, develop industry-grade large models, accelerate applied deployments and use those advances to drive growth in advanced manufacturing.

Contact the writers at liuboqian@chinadaily.com.cn