The financial sector has entered the digital intelligence development stage.Innovative development is not only the driving force for the growth of strategic emerging industries, but also the key factors in leading high-quality economic development.The article empirically investigates the effects and mechanisms of financial digital intelligence on the innovative development of strategic emerging industries, utilising a sample of 5,731 data points from 2015 to 2022, which includes 789 listed companies and 114 prefecture-level cities in China.The results indicated that financial digital intelligence remarkably boosts the innovative development of strategic emerging industries.It enhances innovation by improving corporate information disclosure, reducing transaction costs, and strengthening regional industry-university-research collaboration.Moreover, the effects of financial digital intelligence on the innovative development of strategic emerging industries vary across central, eastern, and western regions, as well as capital-intensive and technologyintensive sectors, with no significant impact noted in other regions and industries.