Exclusive interview with Century Huatong Chief Strategy Officer Hui: Finding the Next Stop for Gaming in the AI Era

Cailian Press, April 1 (Reporter Wang Yanlin) Imagine that when you first step into the world of games, what greets you isn’t a wall of beginner tutorial text filling the screen, but a floating little sprite—it talks with you, helps you get familiar with the game, analyzes your actions, and even recommends friends for you. Game missions are no longer a single main storyline either; they are “tailor-made for each person,” and everyone will have different encounters, generated in real time by AI based on your past behavior.

This kind of gaming experience is moving from imagination to reality. “The gaming industry is a creativity-driven industry.” In an official interview, Wei Guang, the Chief Strategy Officer of Century Hualong, said that when the AI wave sweeps in, what truly deserves attention is how to use technology to activate creativity, so that games can regain new vitality in the AI era.

At a time when technological change is accelerating and advancing, Century Hualong—the A-share gaming market value leader—is trying to build an AI ecosystem blueprint spanning computing power, models, and applications. From hosting the “Shulong Cup” global AI innovation competition to investing in hard-tech companies such as Moore Threads and Wuwen Qiong, Century Hualong is taking a more open posture to secure entry tickets to the future world.

Recently, a Cailian Press reporter conducted an exclusive interview with Fang Hui. From two perspectives—investment and industry—Fang Hui broke down the evolution path of AI + games and explored the future vision of deep integration between AI and games.

How AI rewrites the “gameplay” logic in games

If one word were used to summarize AI’s biggest change to the gaming industry, Fang Hui would choose “innovation in gameplay.”

“The biggest driving force pushing the gaming industry forward is innovation in gameplay.” Fang Hui said that looking across the development of the gaming industry—from “cars-guns-balls,” to MOBA, to open worlds—each time gameplay changes, it comes with the rise of a new generation of games. Today, the global gaming industry is facing a bottleneck: there is less and less innovation in gameplay, and with the arrival of AI, this proposition is bringing more possibilities.

“In traditional games, human-computer interaction is one-way. Backend code fixes the values and the map; even how many health points you lose when you cut someone with a knife is fixed. But in the AI era, all of this will change. Games are no longer one-way, rigid interactions, but fluid, intelligent experiences.” Fang Hui said.

In his view, AI’s penetration into games is going through several stages. The first stage is the “large language model era.” AI can help games carry out some cost-reduction and efficiency-improvement work, including production, publishing, operation, and adding intelligent NPCs—now the industry has already applied this comprehensively. The second stage is “highly human-like,” meaning making the Agents in games more like real people, with emotional expression and behavioral logic like players in the real world—this goal is close at hand.

The third stage is “world models.” As for world models, they can understand the physical laws of a three-dimensional world and have generalization ability. This directly relates to a disruptive transformation in game experience. With “world models” supporting it, every interaction between players and the environment may trigger different feedback. NPCs will no longer just repeat lines; they can respond based on context, and the physical rules in games can be understood and simulated by AI.

“In games, if you take a knife and smash glass, the glass will break; if you cut an iron block, the blade will become dull. Can AI understand these kinds of logic? Can it generate feedback in real time within the game? That is our biggest expectation for world models,” Fang Hui said.

However, he acknowledged that the biggest challenge in the development of “world models” today is the lack of data. Large language models can obtain massive amounts of text, images, and videos from the internet, but real-world three-dimensional physical interaction data is extremely scarce, and the industry is still exploring different technical paths.

Shulong Cup brings AI creativity into “real-world practice”

The development of AI technology has given wings to innovative creativity. The “Shulong Cup” global AI innovation competition hosted by Century Hualong has already entered its second year. The event’s original intent is to build a platform for AI innovation and industrial implementation, so that various cutting-edge technologies can move toward real-world applications.

“The first edition brought us many surprises.” Recalling the first Shulong Cup in 2025, Fang Hui said. At that time, more than 150 teams competed side by side, spanning two major areas: AI games and AI applications. The creativity of these young entrepreneurs left a deep impression on him.

First is innovation in vertical scenarios. “These entrepreneurs aren’t pursuing something big and complete; instead, in niche fields they’ve found points where AI and user needs connect. That’s an important highlight of young people starting businesses.”

Second is interdisciplinary integration. More and more startup teams are working on AI + education, AI + entertainment, AI + creation, and other different domains. Team members come from diverse backgrounds such as algorithms, arts, planning, and engineering, which greatly broadens the imagination space of their products.

More importantly, these teams helped Fang Hui see the “evolution” in China’s AI application space. “Maybe their business models aren’t mature yet, but with so many entrepreneurs exploring, they’re accumulating experience for those who come later. That’s a very good foundation.”

Among the winning teams from the first edition, the AI image generation tool “SeaArt.AI” from Haiyi Huyu impressed him most. “Previously, after game designers finished drawing the original artwork, they had to rely on manual work step by step to apply textures and turn it into a 3D model. Now, with AI generation tools, you can complete it.” Fang Hui said frankly that from technical validation to application enablement—this is exactly the effect the Shulong Cup hopes to achieve.

This year, for the second Shulong Cup, a “raising shrimp” track was specially set up. The name comes from the recent open-sourcing of the AI agent OpenClaw, which sparked “crayfish fever.” In Fang Hui’s view, the emergence of “crayfish”-type products marks AI’s evolution from a tool purely for conversation into an Agent that can help users get things done. AI is moving from “able to talk” to “able to do,” helping users meet the needs of specific scenarios.

For the gaming industry, what kind of imagination space can Agents bring? Fang Hui believes it can become a “second brain” for planners, bringing inspiration for creativity and brainstorming; it can become a “data analyst” for publishing teams, aggregating ad placement data and analyzing creative-to-conversion rates; it can also become a “game partner” for players, helping users carry out specific tasks in the virtual world.

Linking the AI ecosystem through diversified investment

In 2025, Century Hualong launched the “Shulong AI” brand, using the new brand as an anchor point for business development. In addition to the AI application end represented by games, the company extends its reach to multiple layers—such as chips, infrastructure, and the model layer—through external investment, with the aim of building an AI ecosystem that is interconnected and enables one another in synergy.

At the infrastructure level, Century Hualong currently has data centers both in Shanghai and Shenzhen, forming a north-south computing power network. Fang Hui gave an example: if an AI company invested in needs computing power, the computing power demand can be met through the company’s AIDC to enable business cooperation, without having to spend a large amount on token procurement.

“Over the next ten years, the world will enter a new intelligent era, where everything can be made intelligent. Industries such as gaming, education, and industrial sectors will all be reshaped.” Fang Hui said. With the arrival of the AI intelligent era comes enormous demand for underlying computing power. By laying out AIDC now, what they see is certainty for the next decade.

In December last year, Century Hualong sparked heated market discussion about its investment judgment after reports said that, due to its participation in the domestic GPU leader Moore Threads, it had an unrealized gain of over 600 million yuan. Beyond Moore Threads, behind a group of hard-tech companies such as Wuwen Qiong, Blue Arrow Aerospace, Nonxi Robotics, Gongye Robotics, Guangzhou Semi (Semiconductors), and MicroNano Starry, traces of Century Hualong also emerged.

For the gaming industry, new experiences and new outcomes are often built on transformations driven by frontier technology. In Fang Hui’s view, external investment is not a single-point bet; instead, it starts with AI and constructs a new ecosystem that can link to and support each other.

To this end, Century Hualong has built a professional investment team, following the idea that “professional people do professional things.” They have teams that understand algorithms to evaluate AI, and teams that understand chip design to evaluate semiconductors. This kind of technical judgment capability makes them more inclined to place bets in the early and mid stages. Fang Hui believes that true value discovery happens before the company becomes a star enterprise.

When talking about Century Hualong’s forward-looking layout in the technology field, Fang Hui said plainly: “Technology is the primary productive force—that is the basic logic we have always believed in.”

Regarding investment targets, Fang Hui values even more the potential for ecosystem synergy. He said that in the future, they will mainly focus on three investment main lines: the first is AI-related fields connected to the main business, including algorithms, large models, and applications, to empower the gaming and AIDC main businesses; the second is frontier semiconductor areas, such as silicon photonics computing and compute-and-storage integration; the third is aerospace new materials and high-end equipment. “We hope that through investment to support frontier technology, we can in return bring financial returns and ecosystem synergy to ourselves, and even possibly become the company’s second growth curve.”

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