As the core carrier of national scientific and technological competitiveness, the underlying driving force for industrial upgrading, the ballast stone for high-quality economic development, and the strategic barrier for national security, hard tech has gradually become a research hotspot in recent years. Taking “hard tech” as the theme, Chinese literatures from CNKI core journal databases in the past 15 years were selected, and visual knowledge maps of authors, institutions, research hotspots and trends were generated with CiteSpace 6.4R1. It is found that the research enthusiasm has increased significantly in the past five years, but there is a lack of leading core author groups and large-scale research institutions. The research hotspots focus on the industrialization of technological innovation from basic breakthroughs, the cultivation and identification standards of hard tech enterprises, the construction of financial ecosystems adapting to the growth law of hard tech, and the transformation and upgrading of hard tech enterprises driven by artificial intelligence. Intelligent transformation, patient capital, policy empowerment, and cross-domain integration are the future research trends in the field of hard tech.