Cultivating leading level intelligent factories is a strategic measure for China to seize opportunities for industrial intelligence development and build future manufacturing competitive advantages. The data recently released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows that artificial intelligence has penetrated more than 70% of the business scenarios of Leading Factory, accumulated over 6000 vertical domain models, driven the large-scale application of more than 1700 key intelligent manufacturing equipment and industrial software, and formed a group of industrial intelligent agents with perception, decision-making, and execution capabilities, promoting the evolution of intelligent manufacturing from "automation" to "autonomy". At the end of 2025, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and six other departments jointly announced the first batch of 15 pilot level intelligent factories, covering key industries such as equipment manufacturing, raw materials, and electronic information, and conducted beneficial explorations in manufacturing modes. Taking the construction machinery industry as an example, Xuzhou Heavy Machinery Co., Ltd. was selected as one of the first batch of mobile crane intelligent factories with globally customized agile delivery, achieving centralized control and dynamic visualization of the entire process from customer self-service ordering to delivery. The factory promotes four major business innovations: end-to-end generative research and development, agile manufacturing, intelligent operation, and digital twin factory construction, forming three capabilities driven by AI: business empowerment, technology autonomy and controllability, and model replication and promotion. It incubates six intelligent manufacturing capability platforms and more than 180 standard clusters, including intelligent manufacturing technology research, intelligent equipment development, and industrial software development. Xie Cun, Director of the Information and Communication Development Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, stated that the leading level intelligent factory meets the production requirements of high efficiency, high precision, high flexibility, and high quality, setting a benchmark for transformation in their respective industries. Some automobile factories achieve flexible mixed production of multiple vehicle models, some petrochemical factories rely on digital twins to achieve independent operation, and some fiber optic cable factories have overcome the extreme manufacturing process of ultra large prefabricated rods. These changes have led to an average increase of 29% in production efficiency and a decrease of 47% in product defect rates. The navigation level intelligent factory is a carrier for efficient optimization and configuration of various production factors, aiming to break through the bottleneck of the current manufacturing mode from 'local optimum' to 'global optimum', achieve multi-objective optimization and multi factor collaboration, and create an advanced manufacturing industry ecosystem. ”Zhao Gang, President of the Saizhi Industry Research Institute, stated. Leading level intelligent factories not only provide high-end products, but also extend high-value models such as large-scale customization, industry chain collaboration, and predictive maintenance, transforming from "product manufacturers" to comprehensive providers of "products+services+solutions". The leading intelligent factory outputs relevant capabilities to the entire industry, driving more than 1300 upstream and downstream enterprises to collaborate and upgrade, and promoting the overall upgrading of the industrial chain to the high-end. Zhu Keli, founding director of the National Research Institute for New Economy, believes that building a leading level intelligent factory is the core driving force for promoting high-quality development of the manufacturing industry, with multiple meanings of industrial upgrading, enterprise quality improvement, and national competitiveness enhancement. By driving the collaborative upgrading of the industrial chain through the "intelligent manufacturing mother factory" model, a new ecosystem for industry development will be shaped, contributing Chinese solutions to global intelligent manufacturing. With the release of the first batch of 15 leading intelligent factories, China's manufacturing industry's digital transformation continues to move from pilot exploration to systematic change, helping China's manufacturing steadily move towards the high-end of the global value chain. Xie Cun stated that in the next step, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will deepen the implementation of intelligent manufacturing engineering and continue to carry out gradient cultivation of intelligent factories. Specifically, we will further expand our scale, establish more benchmarks, support leading enterprises in exploring future manufacturing models, continuously cultivate a group of leading factories, and lead the overall transformation of the industry; Further refine standards, promote knowledge sharing, systematically summarize best practices, form replicable and promotable technical guidelines, standard specifications, and solutions, and share them with the entire industry; Further open collaboration, contribute Chinese solutions, promote the leading factory to become a source of technology, standards, and rules, and accelerate replication and promotion overseas, providing Chinese wisdom for the digital and intelligent transformation of the global manufacturing industry. (New Society)