Published on Jan. 15, 2026

China's world of "black gold" has long been associated with dangers and hardships. After a string of disasters and collapses of smaller, often illegal coal mines, Beijing has closed down tens of thousands of them over the last two decades. Now, central planners and state-run mining conglomerates are investing in artificial intelligence to increase the safety and efficiency of the remaining ones even further.

"Intelligent Coal Mining Through AI" was the motto of a recent launch event for China's first industry-level large model for the industry on January 7, 2026.

Named the "Solstone Mining Large Model" in English ("Taiyangshi Kuangshan Damoxing" in Chinese), it was developed by the Chinese Institute of Coal Sciences (CICS), a subsidiary of the state-run China Coal Technology & Engineering Group, reported the online portal of the newspaper Guangming Ribao (in Chinese).

The large model will now serve to roll out more and more vertical applications around the country, which will help to address a number of concrete pain points of the industry, the developers explained at the launch event, such as "mining data annotation, knowledge services, visual analytics, dispatch optimisation, regulatory supervision, and compliance management".

Generally speaking, this coordinated deployment is another example of China's state planners using AI to not only supercharge future industries like robotics, drones or fully-automated factories, but also to transform just about every traditional industry in the country. Both of these trajectories have been explicitly named as an important focus of China's economical development in the coming five years.

AI is used to increase the efficiency and output of coal mines, which will play a strategic role for China's energy security in the foreseeable future. The country's total annual coal output has continued to rise in recent years, even though the rapid buildout of solar- and wind energy farms has been raising the relative amount of renewable energy in China's energy mix.

Until the end of 2024, total coal production stood at 4.78 billion tons, and coal consumption amounted to 53.2 percent of total energy consumption in China, data from the National Bureau of Statistics show.

As Beijing feels threatened by trade and technology wars initiated in Washington and by tariffs imposed by Brussels, it can only gradually reduce its reliance on oil imports by investing in solar, wind and nuclear power, especially as total energy demand keeps rising.

While this green transformation is under way, as Chinese politicians have stated repeatedly, coal will continue to play an essential role in safeguarding national sovereignty and the smooth functioning of the world's second largest economy.

Artificial intelligence is regarded as a way to build "a modern energy system" to achieve these goals, as a spokesperson of the CICS said at the launch even for the new large model. For the first time, the Solstone Mining Large model is offering the industry a "full-stack data-training, -application, and -evaluation framework", the Guangming Ribao commented.

The state-run Xinhua News Agency recently gave a rare glimpse into how the transformation in China's mines looks on site, under the earth. Reporting from a coal mine belonging to the Shandong Energy Group, the journalist described how, "along the tunnel walls, AI-powered cameras are mounted every few meters.

“We’ve already installed one or two hundred of these underground,” one of the mine operators explained to the reporter. "These are not ordinary surveillance devices but “intelligent sentinels” equipped with machine-vision technology. They continuously capture environmental changes and workers’ operational behavior, transmitting data in real time to a mining large-model system for analysis and risk assessment", Xinhua reported.

With a state-of the art 5G network installed in depts until 1.000 metres, data can be transmitted to the control centre on the surface. This AI-powered "intelligent brain" of the coal mine is connected to every underground camera, every piece of equipment, and every miner’s smart terminal.

Operators now get a complete grasp of everything happening a kilometre underground in real-time, from the operation of tunneling equipment, to real-time positioning of workers, to subtle changes in gas concentration.

"Coal mines were once hidden deep underground, synonymous with danger and hardship", the news agency commented. It quoted a veteran miner saying that "in the past, going underground meant constant anxiety". Now, those fears are slowly being reduced by "a comprehensive safety system", the report stated.

"High-risk jobs that once depended on experience and physical labor are gradually shifting towards remote monitoring, data analysis, and human-machine collaboration", the report about the deployment of AI in the mine shafts of Shandong province concluded.