China plans an LED sphere a third bigger than the Las Vegas original, but for now it only exists on paper | Daily Reports Online
- A Hong Kong-led venture plans a 168m, 20,000-seat LED sphere in Hangzhou for ¥8 billion (~$1.2 billion)
- Its 72,000m² exterior screen would be a third larger than the Las Vegas Exosphere, the biggest of its kind, at least on paper
- The project is still at the planning stage, with no construction dates, screen vendor or display specs announced
A developer in eastern China has unveiled plans for a spherical entertainment venue that looks to beat the Las Vegas Sphere on every headline measurement, for less than half the price.
The catch is that, so far, the project amounts to a signing ceremony, a rendering and a set of very ambitious forecasts.
The project, dubbed the Eye of the World in English, was reported by AV Magazine after its public debut on October 30 2026 at a services-sector conference in Hangzhou’s Qiantang District.
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A bigger sphere on paper
According to City Express, the plan calls for a sphere roughly 168 meters across and 122 meters tall, skinned in about 72,000 square meters of exterior LED, with a 270-degree wraparound screen and 20,000 seats inside.
It would occupy a 56,000-square-meter plot on the Qiantang River in the Jinshazui New Town area, with around 160,000 square meters of neighboring land earmarked for supporting development.
On the spec sheet, the comparison is flattering when one compares it to the Las Vegas Sphere. AV Magazine puts the Las Vegas venue at 157 meters in diameter and 112 meters tall, with a 54,000-square-meter Exosphere and 17,600 seats, which makes the Hangzhou design about 7% wider and 9% taller, with a third, more exterior screen. The seating gap, however, is narrower than it looks, as Las Vegas reaches around 20,000 when its floor is set up for standing crowds.
The headline budget is ¥8 billion (~$1.2 billion), against the $2.3 billion Las Vegas eventually cost, and the project’s forecast annual revenue is ¥2.6 billion, or $400 million. At the (relatively harsher) exchange rate implied elsewhere in Chinese coverage, the two figures come closer to $1.1 billion and $360 million.
The venture pairs Hong Kong-based Xinshi International Investment Co. with Vision Eye (Hangzhou) Digital Entertainment Technology Co., and Invidis reports that it is led by Huang Junhao, investment president of the former and general manager of the latter. He says the domestically designed project will show that Chinese applied technology and cultural innovation have reached “world-leading levels,” and at the launch he described it as “a spectacle of unimaginable size and unimaginable form.”
Interestingly, for an LED project, the most telling detail is what’s missing: The invidis report also notes that no vendor or installer has been appointed for either the exterior screen or the interior wraparound display, that design, zoning and infrastructure arrangements are still in progress, and that no construction start or completion date has been given.
Nobody has published a resolution, pixel pitch or playback architecture either, and that matters, because the systems behind a screen like this are as demanding as the panels themselves.
In Las Vegas, TechRadar Pro reported that 150 Nvidia RTX A6000 GPUs drive nearly 750,000 square feet of LED with three layers of 16K video at 60 frames per second, fed by a Hitachi Vantara system of 27 nodes and 4PB of flash storage delivering 400GB/s.
The structure won’t be simple either: One analysis notes that Las Vegas used parametric modeling to optimize its geodesic lattice shell and cast-steel nodes, cutting weight by around 40%, and warns that a larger sphere demands even tighter tolerances, where millimeter-level errors could show up as visible seams or patches of uneven brightness. Any claim to be the world’s largest, it concludes, depends on the engineering meeting the paper specifications.
An analysis on a Chinese publication, The Paper’s government affairs channel, argues the cost gap with Las Vegas rests on China’s domestic LED sphere supply chain, which now has a track record of delivery, and that the real difficulty is keeping brightness, color, and seams consistent across tens of thousands of square meters of curved outdoor LED through direct sunlight and temperature swings.
The launch coverage on Sohu flags acoustics as another headache: a concave sphere focuses sound unevenly, and any absorptive treatment has to sit inside the lattice shell without breaking up the screen.
A bloated forecast with questionable demand in tow?
The commercial forecasts look even bolder than the project at hand: The developer expects 9 million to 13 million visitors a year. Spread evenly, that is roughly 24,700 to 35,600 people every day, so even the low end exceeds a sellout of the 20,000-seat bowl 365 days a year.
The Paper’s analysis supplies useful context. In 2025, Hangzhou’s entire performing arts sector drew about 10.25 million attendees across 19,194 shows and took ¥3.12 billion at the box office.
One venue is forecasting roughly the whole city’s 2025 audience and revenue, totaling about 83% of that box office total, though the projected figure presumably also includes advertising, sponsorship, and food and drink. The same analysis also describes The Eye of the World as “still just a drawing, with construction yet to begin.”
The owner of the original isn’t standing still. Sphere Abu Dhabi, on Yas Island, carries a $1.7 billion construction budget and will match Las Vegas with a capacity of up to 20,000, depending on configuration, a 16K-by-16K interior screen, and 167,000 speakers, with completion due by the end of 2029. A 6,000-seat venue at National Harbor in Maryland is targeting 2030.
Sphere is also lining up the technology behind its screens. Announcing a multi-year partnership with media server specialist Disguise in September, Sphere executive vice president Ryan Dolan tied the deal to “offering these experiences to audiences in new Sphere venues around the world.”
Hangzhou keeps prices low and scales up, but not everyone thinks the world needs it. Discussing China’s smaller domes on an AVNation panel, AVIXA’s Jennifer Weaver asked: “Massive replicas of the Vegas sphere all over the place? Probably not.” Hangzhou is betting they are wrong; for now, though, it has a rendering, a riverside plot, and a set of forecasts, while the original, by all accounts, remains busy every day of the year as a revenue-generating juggernaut, bolstered, at least in part by a much more affluent audience to boot.
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