Don't Turn OPC Bases into Upgraded Office Buildings: Trusted Data Spaces and Intelligent Computing Power Are the Key to Breaking the Deadlock

[Ebrun Original] On the eve of the 2026 Spring Festival, in a renovated office building within an industrial base in Haidian District, 28-year-old independent industrial designer Chen Xi was hesitating whether to sign the contract to move in. In front of her was an enticing list of policies: full rent exemption for the first year, a green channel for company registration, and an annual ￥50,000 cloud resource voucher. However, what truly made her hesitate was a question even the investment manager couldn't answer: 'I work alone on industrial simulation. I need to connect to real-time production data from upstream supply chains, and occasionally need to access thousand-card-level computing power to train customized models. Can this place give me access to these resources as easily as turning on tap water?'

This question is becoming a litmus test for the quality of over twenty OPC (One-Person Company) industrial bases nationwide. Since the second half of 2025, from Nanshan, Shenzhen to Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City, from Chengdu High-tech Zone to Wuhan Optics Valley, OPC industrial bases, named to support 'super individuals,' have been springing up like mushrooms. Their policy toolkits are highly similar: rent subsidies, registration convenience, small amounts of computing power vouchers, and occasional entrepreneurship training sessions. However, as this new type of market entity, the 'one-person company,' moves past the initial excitement of the budding phase and begins to face deep-seated challenges such as lack of data assets, sensitivity to computing power costs, and broken ecological connections, those support policies that remain only at the level of physical space and administrative convenience are revealing profound inadequacy.

01 Hidden Worries Beneath Prosperity: OPCs Are Falling into the Trap of 'Low-Level Replication'

According to preliminary research conducted by Ebrun Think Tank, as of the end of January 2026, there were approximately over 20 industrial bases nationwide branded under names like 'OPC,' 'one-person company,' 'super individual,' 'digital nomad,' or 'digital freelancer,' claiming to host over 23,000 enterprises. However, the industry distribution shows a startlingly high concentration: content creation accounts for 47%, e-commerce agency operations for 31%, and graphic design for 12%. These three categories combined account for over 90%.

'How is this different from the Taobao villages ten years ago or the short video bases five years ago?' remarked an expert involved in the research bluntly. 'It's just gathering a group of young people who can use AI for images, copywriting, and video editing, and then subsidizing their rent. This isn't industrial incubation; it's low-level replication.'

More alarmingly, model convergence is exacerbating the fragility of OPCs. Among the 120 one-person companies housed in an OPC base in Hangzhou, 37 primarily focused on AI-generated travel guides. In the second half of 2025, as several major platforms launched similar AI features, traffic for these 'guide freelancers' generally dropped by over 40%, with more than half struggling to sustain themselves.

'They can use Hailuo to generate videos and Deepseek to create content; this is an advantage, but also a fatal weakness,' the expert pointed out. 'Because these tools are public, standard, and easily replaceable. Real competitiveness should come from private data assets and customized models—and this is precisely the blind spot in the current capacity building of OPC bases.'

Feedback from the research offers a thought-provoking conclusion: the biggest bottleneck for current OPC development has evolved from 'whether they possess AI tools' to 'whether they possess an AI threshold.' And building this threshold relies on three core elements: scarce data assets, proprietary model capabilities, and elastic large-scale computing power. These three are precisely the mountains most difficult for solo one-person companies to cross.

02 From 'Subsidizing Rent' to 'Subsidizing Data': The Cognitive Leap in OPC Base Construction

In early February 2026, an article by Ebrun Think Tank titled 'Is the AI Era the Domain of Super Individuals?' was rapidly circulated and quickly gained attention. Many readers provided feedback suggesting that OPC bases should transcend traditional incubators and shared workspaces, offering more targeted and robust support conditions and facilities for tenants. One focus was that the focus of OPC industrial bases should not be conventional rent subsidies or registration convenience, but rather a set of highly targeted new infrastructure indicators.

'This is an important cognitive leap,' said an expert involved in the research. 'The core logic of past support policies was cost reduction—reducing office costs, registration costs, and computing power procurement costs. The new logic shifts towards capability building—helping OPCs construct data assets and model barriers that they cannot build independently.'

This shift stems from a re-examination of a fundamental question: What should a genuine OPC industrial base truly empower? The answer is not 'enabling one person to do the work of ten,' but enabling an individual to possess data factor competitiveness equivalent to a medium-sized enterprise.

In the 'Acquisition-Governance-Utilization-Security' analysis framework proposed by Ebrun Think Tank, the shortcomings in enterprise data factor competitiveness are concentrated in four dimensions: data supply, technical capability, governance systems, and the circulation environment. This framework is equally applicable, and even more pronounced, for one-person companies.

OPCs are 'naturally disadvantaged groups' in terms of data factor competitiveness. They lack historically accumulated business data pools, making it difficult to cross the cold-start threshold of data collection; they have no dedicated data engineers, causing them to shy away from complex data governance systems; they lack legal and compliance teams, making them unable to navigate the labyrinth of data circulation compliance. This is precisely the vacuum that OPC industrial bases should attempt to fill.

03 Trusted Data Spaces: Enabling OPCs to Possess 'Accumulable Data Assets'

In January 2026, the Xiamen City Trusted Data Space began trial operation, becoming the nation's first public data circulation infrastructure open for individual entrepreneurs to join. Within just ten days of opening, over 300 data innovation institutions had joined, with one-person companies and individual developers accounting for over 40%.

'This number surprised us,' admitted the researcher who presented this case. 'We initially thought the main users would be tech companies and research institutions, but we didn't expect such strong demand from individual entrepreneurs.'

He also mentioned an experience shared by an individual developer. This developer was creating an AI-assisted training model for a niche sports equipment. The biggest challenge wasn't the algorithm, but the lack of high-quality training data. Public datasets were too generic, and self-collected data was too costly. Later, through the 'universal connector' of an industry trusted data space, he compliantly accessed desensitized user data from a sports health platform. Combining this with his own small sample data, he completed model fine-tuning, reducing the development cycle from 6 months to 6 weeks.

This case reveals the deep value of trusted data spaces for OPCs: they make the 'cold start' of data factors possible. Under the traditional model, OPCs' data asset accumulation follows a 'chicken or egg' dilemma—without data, it's hard to develop products; without products, it's hard to generate revenue; without revenue, there's no investment for data collection. Trusted data spaces, through secure and compliant external data access and mechanism designs that quantify data value contribution, provide OPCs with a low-cost, low-risk path to cultivate data assets.

OPC industrial bases should deploy 'trusted access gateways' directly connected to regional or industry data exchanges and data circulation custodial service platforms. Tenant entities can complete the entire process of entity authentication, data demand publishing, compliance review, and data delivery within the base, without needing to interface with multiple external organizations themselves. Particularly groundbreaking is the design of the 'OPC Data Asset Custody Account' system. Tenant entities can compliantly custody business data generated during daily operations—such as desensitized customer interaction records, proprietary knowledge bases, model fine-tuning samples—within the base's trusted space. Custodied data not only gains a secure storage environment but can also be discovered by potential partners through a unified metadata catalog, enabling the sedimentation of data asset value.

'This is equivalent to opening a 'data bank account' for each OPC,' a trusted storage expert involved in the research used an analogy. 'What you deposit isn't money, but data; the interest isn't cash, but future collaboration opportunities and model capabilities.'

04 Intelligent Computing Power Network: Helping OPCs Bridge the 'Intelligent Computing Power Gap'

If data is the 'blood' of OPCs, computing power is the 'heart.' However, under the current computing power market structure, OPCs are facing an unprecedented cost disparity, especially for intelligent computing power. Since the second half of 2025, with the continuous explosion in demand for large model training, prices for high-end intelligent computing cards have remained high, and the leasing costs for intelligent computing power on cloud platforms have risen accordingly. For one-person companies, occasional tasks like model fine-tuning and inference optimization face the dual dilemma of being 'unaffordable to rent' and 'unaffordable to buy.'

'I don't need much; just a few dozen cards running for three to five hours at a time, but I just can't get that price,' lamented an independent developer working on biocomputing tools. While cloud vendors' elastic instances are billed by the second with theoretically low barriers, prepaid contract models and long-term commitment discounts aimed at enterprise customers shut out most OPCs.

A more critical issue is the technical barrier. OPCs often lack professional capabilities in model deployment and parallel optimization. Even if they obtain computing resources, they struggle to use them efficiently. 'Computing power vouchers only solve the problem of availability; they don't solve the problems of knowing how to use it or using it well,' said a design expert involved in the research. 'What we need to do is toolify and servitize computing power, allowing OPCs to use it as easily as using a 3D printer.' This expert also mentioned that when the DRC Industrial Design Industrial Base, one of the first cultural and creative industry bases in Beijing, was established, one of its most distinctive features was the role of shared prototyping machines.

05 From Physical Space to Data Space: Reconstructing the Underlying Logic of OPC Industrial Bases

In the view of multiple experts, the core competitiveness of OPC industrial bases is shifting from 'space operation capability' to 'data service capability.' Traditional shared workspaces and incubators are essentially based on a real estate operation logic—generating rental income by providing physical space, with policy subsidies acting as a substitute for rent. Under this logic, the relationship between the base and its tenants is that of landlord and renter, with highly homogenized service content. For industrial bases targeting one-person companies, continuing this logic will inevitably lead to low-level homogeneous competition. Because OPCs' demand for physical space is weakening—they can work in cafes, from home, or collaborate remotely.

What OPCs truly cannot do without is not a desk, but access points to the digital economy's infrastructure. This is the background for proposing the concept of the 'OPC Data Space.' The 'OPC Data Space' is not a metaphor, but an actionable technical architecture and service system. It includes: 1) The foundational layer: trusted data space nodes, intelligent computing power gateways, data circulation service platform clients, etc. 2) The service layer: public data marketplaces, model fine-tuning factories, data compliance toolkits, AI development and operation pipelines, etc. 3) The application layer: data demand matching, industrial chain collaboration networks, data asset valuation, and investment/financing connections, etc.

Under this architecture, the role of the OPC industrial base undergoes a fundamental transformation—it is no longer just a provider of office space, but an aggregator and distributor of digital capabilities.

Currently, a pilot optimization and renovation project is underway in a university town on the outskirts of Beijing, following this approach. In addition to traditional office areas and meeting rooms, the base has allocated nearly 30% of its area to transform into a 'Data Factor Circulation Service Center,' complete with data compliance service counters, shared model training server rooms, and industrial data query terminals. More crucially is the online aspect—tenant entities can, through a unified portal, initiate data access applications, computing task scheduling, and product listing reviews with one click. 'This renovation requires significant investment, but we believe it's necessary,' admitted the person in charge of the base's operations. 'If we only provide desks and coffee, what's the difference from the building next door? Why would anyone insist on coming here?' The key to differentiated competition is shifting from the quality of the spatial environment to the conditions of data capability.

06 Behind the Model Upgrade: From Supporting Individuals to Building Ecosystems

If the first layer of change for new OPC industrial bases is the deepening of service content, then the second layer is more fundamental—a shift in development logic. The growth path of traditional incubators is linear: start-ups enter the park, receive policy support and innovation resources, grow and mature, and then graduate to operate independently (usually within a connected high-tech industrial park). This is a process from dependence to independence. In contrast, the development path of OPCs is likely to be networked: a one-person company doesn't need to 'graduate' because it is itself a node in the ecological network; it doesn't need 'independence' because independence doesn't equate to capability—broader connections and deeper collaboration are the source of competitiveness. This judgment will be validated by future practice.

Therefore, for OPC industrial bases, the real value increment comes from ecological collaboration, not from going it alone. This presents OPC industrial bases with a new proposition: how to transform 'a group of individuals' into 'a network' or 'a cluster'? 'The OPC base of the future should be like a digital cooperative,' a scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences involved in the research described the vision. 'Each member owns their own tools and 'field,' but shares the 'irrigation system,' uses common 'warehousing and logistics,' and collectively faces 'market bargaining'.'

This aligns closely with the National Data Administration's direction to make 2026 a year for releasing the value of data factors and to 'develop data factor circulation service platform enterprises.' Three types of data factor circulation service platforms—industrial internet platforms, data infrastructure operators, and cloud service platforms—are becoming the 'capability infrastructure suppliers' behind OPC bases.

This is an exploration without a standard answer, but the direction is becoming increasingly clear. Two years ago, when the concept of 'one-person company' first entered the policy vision, it was often regarded as a supplement to employment forms. Today, a growing consensus sees OPCs as a microcosm of the transformation in production organization methods in the digital economy era—they are both a product of technological democratization and an embodiment of the platformization of individual capabilities. This means that supporting OPCs cannot be simply equated with 'supporting flexible employment,' but must be elevated to the strategic height of cultivating new subjects of new quality productive forces.

Conclusion: Data Capability is Competitiveness

In this transformation redefining the possibilities of 'one-person companies,' physical space is the carrier, policy incentives are the catalyst, but trusted data spaces and intelligent computing power infrastructure are the true capability foundation. Bases without a digital-intelligent foundation are merely another upscale office space. Bases equipped with a digital-intelligent foundation and data factor circulation service institutions will become incubators for new quality productive forces in data. Ebrun Think Tank will continue to focus on enterprise data factor competitiveness and the cultivation of data circulation service institutions. We welcome in-depth exchanges regarding good experiences and cases, and the Think Tank can conduct comprehensive and in-depth reports on outstanding cases.

Contact email: huangbin@ebrun.com