From low-quality “slop” such as soap operas starring humanlike cats and dating shows featuring anthropomorphic fruit, to increasingly slick productions realistic enough to pass for live action, artificial intelligence-generated video dramas have become almost inescapable on Chinese social media feeds. This week, the format graduated to prime time. A fully AI-generated adaptation of the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West debuted on Hunan Satellite Television, a major state-owned...
One by one, Tesla Model Y Ls roll out of the company’s end-of-line inspection bays, gleaming in black, white and gold. They are a mix of left-hand and right-hand drive – one of many signs the electric vehicles (EVs) produced here are destined for ports around the world. The company touts a total assembly time of less than 40 seconds at its sprawling Gigafactory in Lingang, a coastal area on the far southeastern edge of Shanghai. From there, Tesla says, a finished car can reach the port and be...
The US government owns 9.9 per cent of Intel, converted out of US Chips Act grants, alongside a golden share in US Steel, US$400 million in the rare earth mining firm MP Materials and stakes in roughly 30 firms worth US$26.7 billion. In 2025, Nvidia and AMD gave up 15 per cent of their China chip sale revenues in exchange for export licences. The country that spent four decades advising its allies against picking winners now runs a portfolio. The United States has not fully turned to state...
A Chinese defence industry research facility has unveiled what it calls the world’s first wheeled and legged robot guide dog for visually impaired people, in an example of the sector’s push into a growing range of civilian applications. Hangzhou-based Zhiyuan Research Institute, affiliated with China North Industries Group, the country’s largest defence contractor, launched the robot, dubbed Xiaoyuan, on Friday at the China Care and Rehabilitation Expo in Beijing. Equipped with wheels for smooth...
The global artificial intelligence boom recently crossed a landmark threshold: autonomous agents now consume more than five times as much data as human users, triggering a surge in processing costs that is giving lower-priced Chinese models a competitive edge, according to analysts. Unlike traditional chatbots that simply respond to human prompts, these agents operate independently to execute multi-step workflows, such as writing software, conducting research or managing business operations. A...
OpenAI’s new model, GPT-6 Astra, has less direct visibility into how a model thinks, a development that has sparked concerns coming just weeks after the Hugging Face hacking incident that required a Chinese open model to investigate, according to analysts. When announcing Astra on Thursday, OpenAI said it was “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model,” with a “significant jump in cyber capabilities”. OpenAI president Greg Brockman said at the end of a press call announcing Astra’s arrival...
The United States and China joined other G20 nations in supporting light-touch regulation for artificial intelligence (AI) this week, creating rare agreement between the tech rivals and a potential foundation for further discussions ahead of an upcoming presidential summit. G20 nations agreed to adopt sector-specific rules for AI and avoid creating new AI regulators at a meeting in North Carolina. The Carolina Principles also call for close cooperation between governments and developers in...
Apple’s next flagship smartphone, the iPhone 18 Pro, could cost as much as US$1,319 for the base configuration as skyrocketing memory costs push smartphone prices to record highs, according to a recent report. Prices for the new iPhone line-up were projected to rise by 10 to 20 per cent, driven by soaring memory costs, market research firm TrendForce said in a report released on Thursday. Compared with the baselines of US$1,099 for the iPhone 17 Pro and US$1,199 for its Pro Max variant,...
The artificial intelligence boom has signalled growing risks in the US economy and capital markets, with a setback in the technology rally potentially triggering a sharp correction in US assets and weakening the dollar, according to a Nomura report. “The AI boom has masked a rising US risk premium,” Nomura analysts led by Rob Subbaraman said in a report on Thursday, warning that the concentration of global savings in US dollar assets had left investors increasingly exposed to a reversal in the...
Lan Xiaohuan is a professor of economics at China Europe International Business School. His book, How China Works: An Introduction to China’s State-led Economic Development, has sold millions of copies in China and has been translated into multiple languages. Here, he discusses the economic realities behind China’s record trade surplus, the case for a stronger social safety net, and how public data infrastructure shapes the artificial intelligence race with the United States. SCMP Plus readers...
China’s robots have become skilled at commanding a stage. At last month’s World Robot Conference in Beijing, humanoids sorted parcels, packed phones and performed household chores. Unitree Robotics, whose machines can run, dance and perform martial arts, made an equally dramatic entrance on the Shanghai stock market, closing its first day of trading at more than five times its offer price. The spectacle is real, and so is the engineering achievement behind it. However, this can obscure a more...
Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Moonshot AI – developer of the leading Kimi K3 model – has confidentially filed for an initial public offering in Hong Kong, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, as the firm seeks to tap public markets to fund its rapid expansion. The Beijing-based company was targeting a Hong Kong listing as early as the first quarter of 2027, the sources told the South China Morning Post, asking not to be identified as the information was private. The...
When two of China’s leading AI pioneers went public in Hong Kong in January, they pitched investors on a shared promise: capturing the explosive demand for artificial intelligence at home and abroad. Their first-half earnings, however, suggest that narrative could be splintering into two different trajectories. While Beijing-based Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, is winning over market analysts on the back of surging revenue and top-tier model performance, its Shanghai rival MiniMax is facing...
TikTok parent ByteDance is seeking to expand its computing capacity by building out more data centres in north China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region in the next two years, according to a person familiar with the matter, another example of a Chinese tech giant stepping up its investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure. The company had been in preliminary talks with local data centre vendors to add between five and six gigawatts’ worth of compute in the city of Ulanqab, the person...
US tech titans including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Tesla’s Elon Musk are pressing global powers to curb artificial intelligence regulations, warning that strict guard rails risk suffocating innovation as the US and China compete in an intensifying technological arms race. Speaking at a G20 meeting alongside US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Wednesday, Huang urged policymakers to pursue AI regulations targeting “actual and pragmatic harm” rather than...
Enflame Technology, one of China’s leading AI chipmakers, has sparked a retail frenzy for its 6.12 billion yuan (US$910.9 million) initial public offering in Shanghai’s tech-heavy Star Market, underscoring growing investor appetite for home-grown alternatives to Nvidia. The Tencent Holdings-backed chipmaker saw the retail portion of its IPO oversubscribed by 4,073 times, with about 7 million online investors alone submitting orders for 42.1 billion shares, according to its filing to the exchange...
Chinese technology companies seeking public listings are increasingly concentrated in areas where Beijing is trying to break its reliance on foreign technology, as years of US export controls reshape the country’s pipeline of stock market hopefuls. About 20 per cent of companies that have launched initial public offerings on Shanghai’s Star Market so far this year are engaged in tackling key technological “chokepoints” facing China, compared with just 8.1 per cent in 2022, according to a Morgan...
China’s science and technology minister Yin Hejun has called for global cooperation to manage the opportunities and risks posed by artificial intelligence, as Beijing and Washington face renewed trade and tech tensions ahead of a planned meeting between their leaders later this month. Speaking at the G20 Innovation Ministerial Meeting held in the United States, Yin said the development of AI and other emerging technologies had entered an “unprecedentedly active” period, with opportunities and...
Anthropic’s powerful new Claude Fable 5.1 model has widened its lead in performance benchmarks over Chinese rivals, even as budget-friendly open-weight models from China continue to gain commercial traction globally. The American company said on Wednesday that Fable 5.1, along with a restricted-access version called Mythos 5.1, was the world’s most advanced model for software coding and complex knowledge work. The standard version scored 66 on Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index, taking the...
Major Chinese foundry Hua Hong Grace Semiconductor is pouring US$2 billion into a massive capacity expansion in the Chinese chip production hub of Wuxi, racing to meet skyrocketing domestic demand for AI infrastructure and bypass US tech curbs. The fresh capital would fund the construction of a new 12-inch speciality line, its third facility in the eastern Chinese city, the country’s second-largest contract chipmaker said in a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange on Tuesday. Once fully...
China is cracking down on artificial intelligence-generated “slop” – low-grade, mass-produced synthetic content cluttering social media and news feeds – as part of a sweeping campaign against the abuse of the generative technology, the country’s top internet watchdog said on Wednesday. In a statement posted to its website, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said it had scrubbed more than 5.61 million pieces of harmful or illegal content and removed some 49,000 accounts during its...
Chinese chip equipment giant Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment (AMEC) has unveiled six new machines – at different stages of commercialisation – in a single day as the company accelerates research and development to feed soaring local demand driven by Beijing’s self-reliance push. The new line-up, announced at an industry conference in Wuxi on Tuesday, spans several steps in chip production, including etching tools that carve microscopic patterns into wafers, deposition systems that build...
Tencent Holdings’ use of its vast product ecosystem to train its new Hy4 preview model gives it an edge in developing AI agents and brings its flagship model suite back into the top tier of open-source offerings, according to analysts. The Chinese tech giant’s “differentiated product-plus-model strategy”, where preview models were first deployed across Tencent’s suite of products, enabled it to collect user data before feeding the information back into subsequent rounds of training, Goldman...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] Cybersecurity is evolving from a manual operation to one driven by artificial intelligence (AI). The volume, speed and sophistication of modern cyber threats now exceed the capabilities of conventional processes to handle them alone. AI is reshaping the operating model by automating repetitive, high-volume work while improving accuracy and efficiency across the security life cycle. By accelerating threat detection...
Internet platforms with vast data and large user bases will capture a larger share of artificial intelligence profits in two to three years, even though macro headwinds have temporarily fuelled investor caution over aggressive AI spending by Chinese tech giants, UBS analysts said. Investors have been cautious over a weak macro environment in the second half of the year, and greater AI spending for hardware and infrastructure would drag down short-term profits, but the industry’s power balance...
As Enflame Technology gears up for a 6.12 billion yuan (US$910.3 million) initial public offering on Shanghai’s Star Market, the Chinese artificial intelligence chipmaker must convince investors that its specialised chip strategy can withstand fierce competition from Huawei Technologies and other domestic rivals, while reducing its heavy revenue dependence on major backer Tencent Holdings. Online and offline subscriptions open on Wednesday, after the Shanghai-based start-up announced on Monday...
Artificial intelligence demand and technological domestic substitution drove profit growth for Chinese listed companies to its fastest pace in four years in the first half of 2026, underscoring the nation’s “K-shaped” economic structure as it transitions away from credit-fuelled expansion. Profit for firms on the chip-heavy Star Market under the Shanghai Stock Exchange surged more than fourfold from a year earlier in the six months to June, while those on the similarly structured ChiNext board...
A Chinese court’s order to freeze 2.14 billion yuan (US$318 million) in Nexperia-affiliated assets has cemented the operational independence of its Chinese manufacturing engine from its European headquarters, leaving its local facilities increasingly isolated amid a prolonged custody battle. The Dongguan Intermediate People’s Court in the southern province of Guangdong, where Nexperia’s biggest assembly and test plant is located, has frozen the equity interests in four subsidiaries owned by the...
An OpenAI executive and former White House adviser is calling for AI safety cooperation between Washington and Beijing ahead of a summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, even as Chinese state media launch a scathing attack on American frontier governance in artificial intelligence. “I have always believed US/China AI safety collaboration would be desirable but thought it was unlikely to happen,” Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, wrote on X on Tuesday....
Beijing has ordered Chinese carmakers and component suppliers to refrain from offering steep discounts in overseas markets as they accelerate their global expansion. For the first time, three ministry-level authorities published guidelines governing Chinese carmakers abroad, aimed at improving their global competitiveness, according to a statement by the Ministry of Commerce. “The guidelines aim to promote long-term, healthy development of the Chinese automotive industry in international...
The Chinese-founded artificial intelligence start-up Manus announced on Tuesday that it had formally resumed independent operations, more than four months after Beijing blocked its US$2 billion acquisition by Meta Platforms. The company’s founding team would continue to lead Manus as an “independent agent lab”, the firm said in a blog post on its website, as it sought to move on from a months-long saga that has sent ripples through the Chinese and global technology sectors. The announcement came...
Chinese chipmakers are setting increasingly aggressive targets to source production equipment locally, adding pressure on domestic toolmakers to come up with machines that are reliable in the exacting environment of high-volume wafer production. Several new wafer fabrication plants, or fabs, in the country were setting explicit localisation targets, according to Jie Chen, chairman of Britech Semiconductor Equipment (Shanghai) Corp, who spoke at an industry conference in eastern China’s Wuxi on...
Fast-fashion retailer Shein fell on its Hong Kong trading debut as the unprofitable company contends with rising competition and the loss of tax breaks in key markets. Its shares dropped 0.1 per cent from the initial public offering (IPO) price to close at HK$48.50. They earlier slumped as much as 10 per cent. The company raised HK$13.6 billion (US$1.7 billion) in its IPO, the fourth biggest in Hong Kong this year. The sale valued Shein at about US$26 billion, compared with a peak of about...
Chinese rocket maker Galactic Energy has successfully sent its Pallas-1 medium-to-large reusable rocket into orbit, marking the latest milestone in Beijing’s drive to develop reusable launch capabilities and narrow the gap with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The two-stage, liquid-propellant rocket lifted off at 10am on Tuesday from a self-built launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre’s commercial pilot zone in northwestern China’s Gansu province before entering its designated orbit, according to...
Foreign investors are expected to keep adding to their China A-share holdings, though the pace of buying is likely to slow from the surge in the first half of the year, according to a UBS analyst. “We still expect net inflows in the second half, but the pace will be somewhat slower than in the first half,” said Meng Lei, China equity strategist at UBS Securities, at UBS’s annual China A-share strategy conference in Shenzhen on Tuesday. Foreign appetite for A shares – domestic shares of mainland...
Foreign investors boosted exposures to yuan-traded Chinese stocks by about a third in the second quarter, buying into companies tied to the artificial intelligence supply chain and China’s strategic green-energy industry. Global fund managers held a combined 10.1 billion shares in mainland-listed companies by the end of June, up from 7.5 billion in the first quarter, according to financial data provider Wind. The value of foreign holdings surged 87 per cent to 272.8 billion yuan (US$40.6...
Chinese artificial intelligence company Z.ai on Monday reported a 400 per cent increase in first-half revenue, driven by explosive growth in its open platform and application programming interface business, which helped narrow total losses despite higher research and development spending. Revenue for the six months ended June 30 rose to 953.89 million yuan (US$142 million). Full-year sales were expected to expand 514 per cent to 4.45 billion yuan, according to consensus estimates from analysts...
Huawei Technologies poured more than a quarter of its first-half revenue into research and development, prioritising long-term technological independence over short-term earnings as first-half profit plunged 36 per cent. R&D expenses jumped 25 per cent year on year to 121.4 billion yuan (US$18 billion) for the six months through June, accounting for over 25 per cent of total revenue, according to a filing on Monday with the Shanghai Clearing House, the primary central clearing counterparty in...
As China ramps up its efforts to build an orbital data ecosystem and counter the US in the commercial space race, Shanghai – home to several major domestic players – has kicked off an inaugural space-computing forum alongside a new industry hub. The dedicated centre in the city’s southwestern Songjiang district, unveiled at the forum on Sunday, brought together aerospace developers, semiconductor makers, artificial intelligence specialists, cloud vendors, as well as researchers and investors to...
China’s home-grown artificial intelligence chipmakers are starting to cash in on Beijing’s self-reliance drive, but a fresh wave of first-half earnings reveals a stark divide between the industry’s rising profit stars and loss-making players. Shares of Chinese AI chipmakers traded mixed on Monday as investors digested the financial updates. MetaX Integrated Circuits saw its Shanghai-listed stock rise 2.4 per cent to 691.2 yuan on Monday after reporting a swing to profitability late on Sunday....
Highly anticipated foldable launches from Apple and Huawei Technologies next week are expected to offer a much-needed lifeline to a subdued global smartphone market, which is bracing for an estimated 17 per cent decline in 2026. Apple’s September 9 event has the industry watching closely, with expectations building for its first foldable iPhone to take centre stage alongside standard model refreshes and the keynote debut of new CEO John Ternus. The US tech giant’s biggest product showcase of the...
Some of the world’s biggest music publishers have launched a fresh lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the artificial intelligence giant of conducting “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history”. The case adds to the legal challenges facing Anthropic as the firm eyes a potential blockbuster initial public offering, as the AI industry confronts growing pushback over its use of human-made material to train its models. Sony Music Publishing, Warner...
Leading chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) has joined a growing list of Chinese technology companies suing the US government over their additions to Pentagon blacklists, as legal experts said US courts had shown a willingness to hold the Department of Defence to account. Recent rulings involving Chinese tech firms including lidar sensor maker Hesai Group, drone manufacturer DJI and biotech firm WuXi AppTec indicated that judges were prepared to scrutinise the US government’s evidence...
Drinks, music, vibes … what else can a bar offer to attract customers? One in China’s capital, Beijing, is betting on unlimited access to artificial intelligence models. The AGI Bar in the Zhongguancun tech hub, known as China’s Silicon Valley, was packed with laptop-using customers on a recent night. One of the first things many did after ordering a drink was to connect to the in-house Wi-fi and configure an AI agent to access the free tokens the bar provides. Manager Yang Yuan said the bar,...
JD.com’s rapid expansion in Hong Kong could challenge the property model that has long made the city’s busiest streets and shopping centres its most valuable, analysts say. The Chinese e-commerce giant has invested more than HK$10 billion (US$1.3 billion) in Hong Kong property over the past two years, building a network of stores, warehouses and other assets that analysts said could reduce the importance of footfall for some retailers while increasing the value of logistics hubs and other...
Chinese artificial intelligence companies are carving out a distinct lead over their US rivals in video generation, leveraging vast short-video ecosystems, looser copyright rules and aggressive pricing to dominate an arena where compute alone does not dictate success, analysts say. While US tech giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic continue to lead in frontier closed-source large language models (LLMs), Chinese firms are emerging as some of the most formidable competitors in the AI video...
Ben Jiang / South China Morning Post: Meituan reports Q2 revenue up 14.4% YoY to $15.62B and adjusted net profit of $372M, ending a three-quarter losing streak as the food delivery price war cooled — Revenue for the quarter rose 14.4 per cent year on year to 105 billion yuan, beating the consensus estimate of 101 billion yuan.
China’s semiconductor supply chain was much “safer”, the country’s top economic planner said on Friday, signalling progress in the country’s chip self-sufficiency drive amid mounting pressure from US export controls. The supply chain security of the domestic chip industry had “significantly improved” this year, with home-grown chipmaking equipment and materials growing steadily, marking a transition from “isolated technological breakthroughs” to “full-chain industrial synergy”, Li Chao,...
Chinese chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) reported a sharp surge in first-half revenue on Friday, as the firm released its first financial results since becoming China’s most valuable publicly traded company in a blockbuster Shanghai listing last month. The Hefei-based firm – China’s leading maker of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) products – posted revenue of 150.31 billion yuan (US$22.4 billion) for the six months to June, up 873.64 per cent year on year, according to a filing...
On-demand delivery giant Meituan swung back to profitability in the second quarter as China’s price war in food delivery cooled, allowing the company to scale back subsidies and target higher-value customers. Beijing-based Meituan posted an adjusted net profit of 2.5 billion yuan (US$372 million) for the June quarter, snapping a three-quarter losing streak according to its earnings report on Friday. The figure beat average analyst forecasts of 340 million yuan compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue rose...