Abstract: Climate change and strong human activities have brought new challenges to dam safety management, and traditional safety management concepts and technologies have found it difficult to meet the requirements of high-quality dam safety management in the new stage. The development of cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence and other new-generation information technologies provides an important opportunity for the digital, networked and intelligent transformation of dam safety management. As an important symbol of the modernisation of the dam safety management, smart dam is an important carrier for the development of the new quality productivity of water conservancy. How to use intelligent technology to upgrade and transform the traditional dam construction management system and effectively improve the construction management efficiency and safety guarantee margin has become the focus and difficulty of industry research. This paper comprehensively sorts out the research progress of smart dam construction, puts forward the research idea of smart dam construction and transformation, which coordinates the whole life cycle of dam planning and design, construction, impoundment and operation, and risk elimination and mitigation, and proposes the implementation path for the further development of smart dam construction and management. The aim is to continuously improve the dam safety capacity and promote the transformation of the dam safety management industry from "engineering management" to "intelligent management" through the construction of smart dams.