WAIC Shanghai: 400,000 people, public tickets, and a real-name gate

Getting in

• Tickets come from one place: the official Hi WAIC app. The organisers explicitly warn against third parties selling “insider tickets”, invitation codes or forum places.
• 2026 prices, as a guide: exhibition day tickets from ¥168, forum tickets from ¥298. The exhibition ticket covered all three exhibition sites but not the forums; forum tickets did not include the exhibition.
• Real-name verification is mandatory — one ticket, one identity document, non-transferable, with facial recognition at the gate. An unverified ticket does not get you in.
• Foreign attendees are explicitly provided for on the academic track: its bilingual participant guide requires your name and ID to match your passport, has you register with an email address and password, and lists a Chinese mobile number as optional. That is a rare and welcome sentence to find on a Chinese event site.
• What we could not confirm: whether the main exhibition's Hi WAIC app verification accepts a passport and a non-Chinese phone number on the same terms. If you are coming specifically for the exhibition, write to the ticket desk (ticket@worldaic.com.cn) before you book flights, and leave buffer time.

What it's like

WAIC is a trade show, a conference and a public spectacle at once, on six strands: forums, exhibition, competitions and awards, application demos, incubation and recruitment. The 2026 edition ran alongside a high-level global AI governance meeting, and pulled in twelve government ministries, eight national laboratories, a dozen international organisations and some 1,400 speakers. The purchasing delegations signed intentions worth around ¥20.4 billion, up a quarter on the year before.

For a visitor from the tech world, the draw is not the keynotes — it is the exhibition floor, where the Chinese AI and robotics industry shows what it has built, most of which never appears at western shows.

When

The 2026 edition ran 17–20 July, with the academic conference on 18–20 July. Recent editions have all landed in mid-to-late July, but the organisers have announced nothing about the next one, and we are not going to name a month on their behalf. The main site is Chinese-only; the academic conference site is bilingual and is usually where English information appears first.

Coming for it and want the logistics handled — ticket verification, the venue-hopping, somewhere sensible to stay? Message us on WhatsApp.

Status: The next edition has not been scheduled publicly — we are not going to guess a month for it. This page carries what the last edition actually was, and is updated when the organisers announce. Held annually in Shanghai; recent editions have run in mid-to-late July. The 2026 edition ran 17–20 July (the academic conference 18–20 July). The organisers had published nothing about the next edition when we checked, so we are not naming a month for it. The 2026 edition and its ticketing structure are confirmed from official sources. The next edition has no announced dates. One thing to resolve before travelling: the academic track's registration explicitly treats a Chinese mobile number as optional and registers foreign attendees by passport, but we found no official statement that the main exhibition's app-based real-name check does the same. Source: the conference's official site worldaic.com.cn and the bilingual participant guide for the 2026 academic conference, plus Shanghai municipal reporting on the 2026 edition's ticketing and results · checked 2026-08-22