Inside the control room at Shandong Steel's Rizhao plant, parameters flicker in real time while glowing steel billets roll off the line automatically. The "brain" behind this is the Shangzhi metallurgical AI model from Shanding Yunke. At the 2026 AI Industry Conference held in Jinan on October 14-16, Shandong showcased seven flagship vertical LLMs, quickly dubbed the "Qilu Seven Stars."

389 models, 170+ companies: an industrial province's AI reserves

According to Sun Zhiqiang of the Shandong Provincial Department of Industry and Information Technology, 389 models in the province have passed third-party assessment. Officials selected 100 for priority promotion using five criteria — technical performance, economic benefit, social recognition, industry track and real-world deployment — then crowned seven benchmarks led by Inspur Hairuo, COSMO TIANZHI and Shanding Shangzhi, spanning manufacturing, metallurgy, mining and ports. Beyond the "Seven Stars," more than 170 model companies are under key monitoring province-wide.

Frontline scoreboard

· Shanding Shangzhi: 40+ industrial scenarios incl. ore blending and automatic steel rolling; comprehensive cost down 3-6 yuan per ton

· Yunding mining model: 280+ scenarios deployed a kilometer underground

· Fangzhou port model: 19 business agents across 80+ scenarios; loading efficiency up 15%+

· Inspur Hairuo: 1,300+ chemical-production "tricks" encoded; corrosion-prediction enables on-demand maintenance

Why Shandong: trading industry corpus for scene intelligence

Shandong's complete industrial base has accumulated deep process data — the soil vertical models grow in. COSMO TIANZHI gives oilfields a "digital crew" stationed at extraction, blending, separation and safety posts, with proactive alerts and minute-level fault localization.

"We hand AI capability to users, letting enterprises cultivate their own scene agents." — Xiao Xue, CTO of Inspur Group and chairman of Inspur Cloud

Infrastructure is catching up: the Shante intelligent-computing alliance will soon launch a multi-source scheduling platform making compute as easy as hailing a ride, while Shandong Mobile's "Qilu Zhizao" token factory offers pay-as-you-go model infrastructure.

From showcase to standard practice

For teams like Jiutian focused on industry deployment, the lesson is direct: enterprise AI is won not on benchmark leaderboards but on measurable operating metrics like cost per ton of steel. As process know-how gets encoded into model systems, the cost of intelligent transformation keeps falling — a signal of collective change across manufacturing provinces. The next question: can the "Seven Stars" model replicate beyond Shandong?

(Information synthesized from Xinhua News Agency, Ifeng Shandong, Dongying Daily and Economic Observer reports)