Nanjing Iron & Steel Co. (NISCO) has worked with Huawei alongside ecosystem partners to commercially deploy the world’s first steel model powered by swarm intelligence; namely, the YuanYe Steel Large Model (YuanYe), across multiple scenarios at scale. The development supports NISCO in transitioning its core operations to being powered by data and intelligence.
To help navigate transformation and cost efficiency challenges, NISCO has built a robust digital and intelligent foundation by adopting industry-leading products: Ascend, Kunpeng, Huawei Cloud Stack and Pangu models. The manufacturer has embedded AI into every core stage of production, including ironmaking, steelmaking, rolling and quality inspection, to forge green and high-end AI-powered super steel plants.
This innovative model fuses multiple AI models with the steel industry’s metallurgical mechanism models to create a dual-drive, multi-model cluster architecture which features a ‘right brain’ for probabilistic computing and a ‘left brain’ for precise and scientific decision-making. The massive amounts of sensing data aggregated from millions of Operational Technology (OT) data points across 26 business domains have enabled NISCO to achieve real-time digital twin mapping within its intelligent operations centre, laying solid data foundations for YuanYe. This means the entire steelmaking process has become visible as well as capable of precise control and intelligent assessment. The entirety of NISCO’s key equipment is now connected and digitally controlled and its new product R&D cycles have been shortened by 50%, reducing annual costs by around US$15 million.
Alongside YuanYe continuing to iterate, by October this year NISCO had launched 25 business agents covering a range of scenarios – from visual quality inspection and process optimisation to production scheduling and operations management, setting a new standard for digital and intelligent steel transformation.
“Digital and intelligent transformation is inherently human-centric,” said Li Jinyan, General Manager of the Digital and Intelligent Integrated Development Department and Director of the AI Research Institute at NISCO. “Its purpose is not to replace people, but to unleash human potential. Our goal is to lift employees out of the endless sea of data, empowering them to direct their creative energy towards work of higher value.”
More than 300 AI models have been deployed across NISCO’s plants, alongside over 1,000 low-code agents and lightweight applications built independently by frontline employees.
“The real value of industrial AI can only be realised when it expands from single-point applications to comprehensive integration with production, operations and management, which can unlock sustained, scalable empowerment,” said Cheng Yongfu, Senior Industrial Solution Expert at Huawei’s Steel & Non-ferrous BU.
Looking to the future, NISCO will collaborate with Huawei and other partners to explore the construction of dedicated data centres for smart steel plants. Centred on the AI-native three-tier architecture (AI-native OS, AI-native factory and AI-native enterprise) and powered by the YuanYe model, NISCO is accelerating high-quality steel development, aiming to provide a replicable and scalable benchmark for the digital and intelligent transformation of the global steel and manufacturing industries.
