Production is underway at Luoyang LYC Bearing Group's smart workshop on May 20, 2025.

A drone over Tiemen town in Luoyang captures the 5G digital chili demonstration base blanketed in red on Dec 1, 2024.

A stunning sunset graces Luoyang's new district on Sept 23, 2025.

Economic figures for Luoyang, Henan province, stood out during the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25). The city's total economic output exceeded 600 billion yuan ($89.6 billion), with its per capita GDP surpassing 80,000 yuan.

Beyond output growth lies a marked rise in the technological content of local industries. By the end of 2025, the number of high-tech enterprises in Luoyang had increased by 103 percent compared with the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20). High-tech industries accounted for 55.8 percent of the value-added output of industrial enterprises above designated size.

Innovation can be witnessed across Luoyang Yibin economic and technological development zone. At the P3 laboratory of Pulike Biological Engineering, researchers work on frontier biological technologies, while at the Luoyang base of battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology, batches of power batteries roll off production lines.

Contemporary Amperex Technology's Luoyang base posted a monthly output value of 5.6 billion yuan in July, hitting a record high since it went into operation. By the end of July, the base's cumulative output value had reached 42.8 billion yuan, injecting strong momentum into the high-quality development of the city's new energy battery industry chain.

The base has now fully launched production across all four phases. Phase I and Phase II boast mature technological processes and stable coordination between production and sales, supplying products to major domestic new energy vehicle makers. The cell production lines of Phase III and Phase IV adopt an entirely automated and digital production system, serving as new growth drivers for the enterprise's output expansion.

The push toward high-end manufacturing extends well beyond batteries. At Luoyang LYC Bearing Group, a 25-megawatt-class main shaft bearing for wind turbines has rolled off the assembly line, with core technologies reaching industry-leading levels.

Known as a cradle of China's bearing industry, LYC has invested more than 1 billion yuan in production line upgrades and built an advanced smart factory for wind-turbine gearbox bearings, so that data can flow uninterrupted across design, machining and inspection workflows.

Such manufacturing strength is being put at the service of major science infrastructure. Dubbed an "eye on the sky", the QiTai radio Telescope, now under construction in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, is designed to be among the most precise fully steerable radio telescopes in the 100-meter class being built worldwide, with one of the widest frequency ranges. It is scheduled to be put into operation in 2028.

To deliver stable support for the antenna's elevation structure, the LYC research team has overcome a series of key technical hurdles: high-reliability long-life design for bearings for 100-meter-class telescopes, precision manufacturing of wide and heavy bearing rings, high-precision machining of large-diameter ultra-long rollers and non-destructive assembly of superlarge and ultrawide bearings. The product passed acceptance inspection on the first attempt, filling a gap in China's supply capacity.

From July 17 to 20, the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance was held in Shanghai. Two Luoyang-based companies — machine vision specialist CASI Vision Technology and bearing maker Luoyang Hongyuan Bearing Technology — presented an industrial embodied quality inspection robot and robotic reducer bearings respectively.

For the robot, the training cycle for handling a new product category has been shortened to less than 24 hours. It is advancing China's industrial quality inspection into a new era of embodied intelligence and ecosystem-driven collaboration.

Luoyang's development also exemplifies the pursuit of greener growth. By the end of the 14th Five-Year Plan, faster development of solar, wind and hydrogen energy had raised clean energy to more than 50 percent of Luoyang's total installed power capacity, up about 13 percentage points from the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan.

A total of 71 provincial-level integrated source-grid-load-storage projects have been approved, enabling the city to consume more than 742 million kilowatt-hours of locally generated green power annually.

Green innovation is also transforming agriculture. In August, prototypes from the Luoyang Research Institute of Intelligent Agricultural Equipment, which are among China's first hydrogen-powered self-propelled plant protection machines and battery-electric self-propelled transplanters, completed field tests locally.

The plant protection machine runs on a hybrid system combining a hydrogen fuel cell and a lithium battery pack, leaving not a wisp of smoke as it moves through the crops. Its hydrogen-to-electricity conversion rate exceeds 55 percent, and a high-performance hydraulic drive keeps power transmission steady.

The height of its spray boom adjusts dynamically to the needs of tall-stem crops such as corn at different growth stages, effectively avoiding damage to plants during mechanical operation.

The battery-electric self-propelled transplanter carries four-row planting units, with a single-row output of up to 7,680 seedlings per hour. Equipped with the Beidou Navigation Satellite System, it supports both remote-controlled and unmanned driving for high-precision, large-scale and continuous transplanting.

As China pursues its dual-carbon goals, Luoyang Hongyuan Bearing Technology has tapped rooftop renewable energy potential. Its smart photovoltaic-energy-storage control project generates 5.9 million kWh of clean power a year.

Furthermore, the company's integrated PV-storage smart energy management platform monitors power output, storage response and production load in real time. It automatically optimizes the timing of charging and discharging according to electricity price signals and load forecasts. In case of grid outages, the system can switch to emergency power supply to sustain round-the-clock production.

In December 2023, Luoyang was selected as one of the country's first batch of pilot cities for coordinated innovation in pollution reduction and carbon mitigation. By the end of 2025, the city had built 138 green factories and industrial parks at or above the provincial level.

It had also cultivated seven provincial-level digital energy and carbon management centers, with 11 items of industrial energy and water-saving technologies and equipment accredited at or above the provincial level.