China Mobile National Structure
At the national level, China Mobile functions as a centrally controlled state-owned telecommunications group whose “China Mobile” trade name covers both the listed operator (China Mobile Limited, listed in Shanghai and Hong Kong) and its ultimate state parent (China Mobile Communications Group Co., Ltd.), with government control maintained through the parent’s majority ownership and central SOE oversight under SASAC; this structure places the company within China’s national strategic infrastructure system, aligning it with state policy goals such as nationwide network buildout, rural connectivity programs directed by MIIT, and participation in state-led industrial initiatives, while its scale and perceived security relevance also shape its international treatment, including U.S. sanctions-related actions and regulatory scrutiny.
China Mobile Regional Structure
At the regional level, China Mobile operates through an integrated, nationwide network that spans all 31 provincial-level administrative units in mainland China (provinces, autonomous regions, and directly administered municipalities) and extends into Hong Kong via a wholly owned subsidiary, meaning its regional presence is best understood as locally executed branches of a single centrally governed carrier rather than autonomous regional firms; operationally, this shows up as province- and city-level rollout and service packaging (including rural-oriented offers and monitoring products tailored to local use cases), but with capital allocation, standards adoption, branding direction, and major procurement decisions determined at the center and implemented consistently across regions.
China Mobile Innovation Research Institutes
China Mobile’s “innovation research institute” network is a set of regionally anchored, group-linked R&D entities that connect China Mobile’s central technology priorities to local industry and government demand by placing applied research, solution engineering, and pilot-to-product work inside major regional ecosystems. The institutes are organized around strategic geographies and industry clusters—such as Zhejiang’s export and manufacturing base, the Greater Bay Area’s digital economy and advanced industry concentration, Jiangsu’s large enterprise base, Guiyang’s big-data and computing focus, and Hong Kong’s international-facing market—and they operate as provincial or regional capability hubs that can build and operationalize offerings (for example, digital human and AI applications) using China Mobile’s national assets in network, cloud, and compute while delivering deployments through the local China Mobile operating companies and their partner networks.
China Mobile (Zhejiang) Innovation Research Institute (中国移动（浙江）创新研究院)
China Mobile Greater Bay Area (Guangdong) Innovation Research Institute (中移湾区（广东）创新研究院)
China Mobile Zijin (Jiangsu) Innovation Research Institute (中国移动紫金（江苏）创新研究院)
China Mobile Big Data (Guiyang) Innovation Research Institute (中国移动大数据（贵阳）创新研究院)
China Mobile (Hong Kong) Innovation Research Institute (中國移動（香港）創新研究院)
China Mobile Jiutian AI Platform
China Mobile’s Jiutian AI Platform (九天人工智能平台) is an end-to-end AI services stack that combines AI computing resources, algorithms, and data with an ecosystem of internal and external capabilities to support both operator intelligent operations (including “autonomous network” scenarios) and industry solutions across domains such as industrial, healthcare, government, education, and finance. It presents a portfolio of large models (including a general foundation model plus domain models for healthcare and government services), alongside a “large-model production platform” that covers the full lifecycle of model design, training, fine-tuning, compression, deployment, hosting, and inference, and an application platform for building and integrating intelligent applications with plugins and model experiences. The platform also emphasizes research and standards activity (papers at major conferences and participation in drafting evaluation and technical requirement standards), and it frames partnership and adoption through programs for co-building an AI industry ecosystem, running AI competitions, and coordinating operator cooperation initiatives, positioning the offering as “AI that can be used like mobile communications” built on China Mobile’s 5G, cloud, and AI integration approach.
China Mobile’s “Jiutian” (九天) AI platform is positioned as the underlying compute-and-model stack that makes digital humans operational at scale, supplying the training and inference infrastructure, data resources, and core algorithms needed for speech understanding, dialogue, information retrieval, and multimodal generation that a digital human interface relies on. In practice, Jiutian is used to power public-service and enterprise deployments where a digital human acts as the front-end “agent” for users—taking spoken queries, producing near-real-time answers, and guiding people through procedures—such as digital government assistants, hotline-style customer service, and other high-concurrency service scenarios. It also supports domain-specific large models (for example, government-services models trained on policies, documents, and process data) so digital humans can answer within regulated, workflow-heavy contexts rather than only generic conversation, and it enables productized creation and interaction experiences where users can build or customize a digital human and then drive it through Jiutian-backed capabilities.
(Jiutian AI Platform (九天人工智能平台) is used as the primary, most standard label for the platform itself, while “Nine Heavens Artificial Intelligence” (九天人工智能) functions more like the broader brand or program name that can encompass the platform plus related models, ecosystem cooperation, courses, competitions, and other activities.)
China Mobile Digital Human Activity
China Mobile’s digital human activity centers on deploying “digital humans” as front-end service agents and multimodal interaction layers built on its telecom and cloud capabilities, including large-model-based customer-service integrations for major enterprises (combining digital humans with AI navigation and agent/seat assistance), government service deployments (AI digital human guides and “government service” applications built with large models such as DeepSeek under local subsidiary support), healthcare pilots that rely on China Mobile’s local dedicated compute and network resources for AI medical digital humans, accessibility projects that integrate “new calling” functions with AI to deliver sign-language digital human assistants, content and metaverse-style production pipelines through MiGu that package 3D digital humans with scene capture/reconstruction/editing and publishing, and security-oriented use cases such as anti-fraud digital humans and networked video products, alongside consumer-facing productization in Hong Kong through an “AI toolbox” that includes generating a personalized digital avatar from a single uploaded photo.
China Mobile Migu (咪咕) is China Mobile’s digital content arm and operates large-scale consumer media services while positioning “digital humans” as part of a broader metaverse and AI media-production stack: it has publicly framed its metaverse build-out as an organizational and infrastructure investment, including establishing metaverse headquarters in Xiamen, with the stated aim of building capabilities for digital content in areas such as VR/AR and related virtual production. In practice, Migu has repeatedly tied these capabilities to sports and large-event viewing, promoting multi-screen, multi-angle, and immersive experiences that use 3D/interactive production workflows and can incorporate digital-human style elements as part of “tech-enabled viewing” experiences showcased around major tournaments. It has also pursued partnerships that reinforce this positioning as a technology-and-rights platform rather than only a streaming app, including an audio/video collaboration with Intel in the 2025–2026 period and a multi-year digital rights deal making Migu an exclusive digital rights holder in China for FIBA basketball competitions, both of which align with its emphasis on advanced production, distribution, and next-generation viewing formats where digital-human presentations can be deployed as one component of the overall experience.
Migu Xinkong Culture Technology (Xiamen) Co., Ltd. (咪咕新空文化科技（厦门）有限公司) is a China Mobile Migu group company positioned as an Xiamen-based metaverse/XR and digital-content operator that also develops “digital human” (virtual human) capabilities for media, events, and immersive cultural experiences; public institutional descriptions identify it as a wholly owned subsidiary of Migu, established in Xiamen in December 2014 and formerly known as Migu Animation (咪咕动漫有限公司). In the context of digital humans, industry coverage attributes to the company an end-to-end “digital human” production workflow and describes deployments where digital humans are built as user-facing personas used across entertainment, marketing, exhibition halls, and live events, including real-time multi-avatar transmission for interactive presentations. Its R&D footprint includes a university–industry joint center with Tsinghua University-affiliated labs that has published peer-reviewed work on trust in virtual agents, including methods for building stylized 3D digital humans and evaluating how appearance stylization and synthetic voice influence user trust, with dissemination at IEEE VR 2025. On the IP side, recent patent filings list the company (alongside related China Mobile entities) as an applicant for a virtual-human motion-generation method that uses a pretrained music-generation model to drive pose and movement, framed as a way to reduce the cost of producing virtual-human motion. Operationally, it is also described as helping anchor China Mobile Migu’s “metaverse MIGU” footprint in Xiamen, including participation in local metaverse alliances and the rollout of 5G+AR/XR cultural exhibition experiences that align with digital-human use cases in immersive venues and media productions.
U.S. Sanctions on China Mobile
U.S. sanctions and related U.S. regulatory actions affecting China Mobile can create practical and reputational risk for international customers considering China Mobile–linked digital human products and services, even when the customer is outside the United States, because many enterprises have U.S.-touchpoints in financing, procurement, cloud/telecom interconnection, compliance, and vendor risk management: U.S. investment restrictions under the Executive Order framework (which restricts U.S. persons’ securities transactions in designated Chinese companies) can make some counterparties, investors, and banks more cautious about commercial exposure, while FCC national-security actions have constrained China Mobile’s U.S. telecom authorizations and placed the company on U.S. security-risk lists, increasing the likelihood that U.S.-regulated firms will require enhanced due diligence, stricter contractual controls, or outright exclusion from bids; for customers, this typically translates into added compliance checks around data handling and lawful access, pressure to ensure service delivery can be isolated from U.S. networks and U.S. persons where needed, potential complications if the solution depends on U.S.-based infrastructure or U.S.-connected carriers, and a higher probability of procurement delays or “vendor de-risking” decisions driven by internal policy rather than product performance.