Jensen Huang marked the coming Lunar New Year with Nvidia employees in Shanghai on Saturday, as the CEO of the world’s most valuable company made his first trip to China in 2026 amid uncertainties around its H200 graphics processing unit (GPU). Huang received a rock-star welcome when he joined Nvidia’s annual Lunar New Year celebration, according to two employees who asked not to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media. Huang gave a speech and handed out tangerines that he...
After five years of playing catch-up, China has produced a worthy “Tesla killer”, a massive achievement for the country’s premium electric vehicle (EV) makers that is set to stoke national pride. Sales of Xiaomi’s fully electric SU7 on the mainland stood at 258,164 last year, nearly 30 per cent higher than the Model 3’s deliveries of 200,361 units, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA). Since its debut in China at the end of 2019, the Model 3, assembled at the...
As the number of people living alone in China skyrockets, a wave of products and services is emerging to address the safety, social and mental health needs of the country’s solo-living population, analysts said. The issue was thrust into the public spotlight earlier this month, when a check-in app called Are You Dead? – or Sileme in Chinese – briefly surged to the top of paid app charts in mainland China and several other markets, revealing the scale of China’s vast and rapidly expanding solo...
The new year kicked off with the blockbuster public market debuts of two Chinese artificial intelligence high-flyers – Zhipu AI and MiniMax – making them the world’s first publicly listed large language model (LLM) start-ups. The listings put them ahead of US rivals including Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Amazon.com-supported Anthropic, which have yet to reach public markets. Both Chinese companies have been backed by heavyweight investors, including state-linked funds and big tech groups such as...
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has begun his latest trip to China – visiting a grocery market in Shanghai on Saturday after touring the chipmaker’s local office – at a time when Beijing is expected to allow imports of the company’s H200 artificial intelligence chips. Huang was seen at a grocery market on Saturday in Shanghai’s busy Lujiazui area, looking relaxed, according to multiple photos circulated on social media. Earlier, Huang met with Shanghai-based staff to review Nvidia’s milestones for 2025...
The plans of Alibaba Group Holding and Baidu to list their semiconductor design units could intensify competition with other domestic artificial intelligence chip developers to unseat Nvidia as the country’s top supplier of high-performance AI processors, according to analysts. The two Chinese internet peers’ initiatives reflected the strong investor appetite for AI chip firms and growing demand for alternative computing resources in the domestic AI sector, as Beijing pushed for greater...
The US-China tech rivalry is no longer confined to the laboratories, fabs and boardrooms of the industry’s biggest names – the artificial intelligence battlefield has now expanded into the capital markets, where ambition is priced in real time. As Washington and Beijing push rival technology ecosystems, initial public offerings and listings are becoming a high-stakes referendum on who gets funding, credibility and, most of all, the runway to scale. Across the Pacific, the contest has been...
Chinese regulators are targeting one of the world’s biggest travel platforms in an anti-monopoly probe after complaints it had hurt travellers and travel operators in China’s expansive tourism market, analysts said. Unlike the broad legal actions against Chinese tech firms and cram schools five years ago, the investigation into Trip.com is seen as a relatively isolated case – yet one that might precipitate others – in response to issues over commissions, exclusivity and the sophisticated use of...
DJI, a dominant force in the global drone and camera-stabiliser markets that has come under siege from fierce competition and a protracted trade war, is navigating an unprecedented situation: as it grapples with expanded US tariffs and tightened scrutiny, products bearing striking resemblances to its own designs are emerging in the market under other brands. The next “clone” may be a wearable action camera – the Xtra ATTO – which is expected to enter the US market in the first half of the year....
TikTok has officially launched a US joint venture tasked with “safeguarding the American content ecosystem”, with commercial activities such as e-commerce, advertising and marketing remaining under the company’s existing US entities. The arrangement has been widely compared with Apple’s 2018 move to transfer mainland Chinese iCloud user data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), according to Chinese media. GCBD is a project owned by the Guizhou provincial government-backed company AIPO Cloud...
Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings cited data privacy risks after its request to remove open-source WeChat export tools from GitHub sparked an online backlash. Some of the projects claiming access to WeChat chat records have used reverse engineering, among other techniques, to crack local database keys, bypassing the app’s encryption mechanisms, according to Tencent. “These actions compromise user privacy and data security and could be exploited by malicious actors,” Tencent said in a statement...
Zhipu AI, known internationally as Z.ai, is restricting sign-ups for its new flagship artificial intelligence coding product, as existing users face performance issues amid a computing crunch that continues to beset Chinese AI firms. On Wednesday, the Beijing-based firm announced in a WeChat post that it would limit new sign-ups for its GLM Coding Plan to 20 per cent of existing levels and crack down on “malicious” use. This issue reflected the challenge faced by a growing number of Chinese AI...
Alibaba Group Holding is paving the way for a listing of its wholly owned chip design unit T-Head, as a renewed frenzy to fund semiconductor development in China gathers pace, Bloomberg reported. T-Head, founded in 2018, is set to be first restructured into a separate business partly held by employees, followed by Alibaba exploring an initial public offering (IPO), Bloomberg reported citing sources, adding that the timing remained unclear. Alibaba owns the Post. Alibaba’s US-listed American...
Baidu on Thursday unveiled Ernie 5.0, a multimodal artificial intelligence model with 2.4 trillion parameters, as use of the Chinese tech giant’s AI-powered namesake assistant climbed to 200 million monthly active users. The omni-modal foundation model, capable of processing text, images, audio and video, is the Beijing-based company’s most advanced to date. The model was first previewed in November and has since climbed the rankings. A leaderboard published last week by LMArena showed...
China has kicked off construction on the southern section of the Tibet-Guangdong ultra-high-voltage power transmission line, an ambitious scheme to channel vast amounts of green energy generated high in the mountains of western China to factory hubs along the country’s south coast. The project – which will shoot the equivalent of half the electricity produced by the Three Gorges Dam across China each year – comes as Beijing strives to push forward with its carbon-reduction plans and keep up with...
Moore Threads, one of China’s artificial intelligence chip champions, expects to report a tripling of revenue for 2025, reflecting how local semiconductor firms are expanding rapidly amid Beijing’s push for self-sufficiency. The company, founded in 2020 by Nvidia’s former China head Zhang Jianzhong, said it expected revenue to land between 1.45 billion yuan (US$208 million) and 1.52 billion yuan after surging between 231 per cent and 247 per cent compared with 2024, according to a stock exchange...
China’s “infrastructure first” approach to developing its artificial intelligence industry will help unlock frontier innovation in the fast-moving technology, according to the president of Kimi model developer Moonshot AI. The country’s energy buildout had made the supply of electricity “very cheap”, which was essential for fundamental research and innovation, said Moonshot’s Zhang Yutong in Wednesday’s panel discussion on China’s “AI Plus” strategy at the World Economic Forum in Davos,...
US tech giant Apple is offering discounts of up to 1,000 yuan (US$144) on selected products to customers in mainland China, the latest promotion from the iPhone maker ahead of an expected holiday shopping wave and heightened competition from local rivals. Promoted as a limited-time Lunar New Year offer, Apple said buyers of iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus from its mainland China website and official stores between January 24 and 27 would receive the discounts, which also applied to some MacBook,...
Chinese AI companies wanting high-performance artificial intelligence chips from Nvidia are facing a dilemma: source them from the black market at much higher prices, or accept lower performance domestic alternatives from the likes of Huawei Technologies. That is because Chinese customs officials are currently holding Nvidia’s H200 chips at the border, despite Washington granting approval for the US company to ship its second most advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) to China, according to...
Jeffrey Ding is an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University. He is the author of Technology and the Rise of Great Powers, an award-winning book exploring the impact of technology on geopolitical competition, as well as the founder of the ChinAI newsletter, which tracks developments in China’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry. In this interview, Ding explains why “diffusion”, not innovation, will determine whether China or the US will prevail in the AI race,...
New Google research into DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud’s artificial intelligence models has found that powerful reasoning models capable of “thinking” demonstrated internal cognition resembling the mechanisms underpinning human collective intelligence. The findings published on Thursday suggested that perspective diversity, not just computational scale, was responsible for the increasing “intelligence” of AI models, while also underscoring the growing importance of Chinese open models for...
Frontier research lab MiroMind, a subsidiary of the China-founded multinational firm Shanda Group, has asked some of its staff in Shanghai to relocate to Singapore, according to people with knowledge of the matter, raising comparisons to artificial intelligence start-up Manus’ pull-out from China last year. Those actions came amid Sunday’s reorganisation announcement by Shanda and Singapore-based MiroMind, which said its research on artificial general intelligence (AGI) and fundamental...
The world is witnessing the biggest infrastructure buildout in history, with the foundation for an artificial intelligence system evolving quickly, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “We are now a few hundred billion dollars into it,” he said at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos on Wednesday, adding that trillions of dollars of infrastructure still had to be built. Huang described the AI industry as a “five-layered cake” – energy at the bottom, followed by chips, cloud infrastructure,...
The municipal government of Shanghai will open “free-to-fly” zones in the city for drones from February 1, as part of streamlined regulations designed to support the country’s development of a low-altitude economy. According to Shanghai’s new guidelines for civil unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), consumer drones will be allowed to fly in certain “suitable airspace” in the city without prior declaration, provided these devices are registered. These include UAVs categorised as micro, light and...
China aims to make breakthroughs in artificial intelligence chips, accelerate 6G development and establish key benchmarks for humanoid robotics, as the country kicks off its new five-year plan prioritising innovation as a key driver of economic growth. To promote the development of the AI industry, the government was targeting breakthroughs in core technologies such as training chips and heterogeneous computing, officials from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said at a...
Shanghai’s tax authority fined an operating entity of PDD Holdings, the US-listed e-commerce company that runs leading retail platforms Pinduoduo and Temu, citing its failure to comply with local tax requirements, according to a Wednesday report from state news agency Xinhua. Shanghai Xunmeng Information Technology, a PDD subsidiary which operates Pinduoduo, failed to report necessary information concerning its platform operators and employees for the third quarter of 2025, the city’s tax...
China’s government-led push into artificial intelligence (AI) contrasts with the US’ private sector-led approach, with the world’s two largest economies advancing along divergent paths, according to China International Capital Corp (CICC). Chinese investments in AI had focused on underlying technologies, including advanced semiconductors, to address a shortage of computing resources resulting from the country’s restricted access to advanced chips, the state-backed investment management firm said...
Significant worldwide shortages of memory chips are expected to persist well into 2027, according to analysts, even as the sector’s top manufacturers – Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology – move to boost production capacity. According to a report by Hangzhou-based Zheshang Securities, industry expansion plans through 2026 and 2027 were unlikely to bridge the global supply gap. Micron on Saturday said it aimed to meet global memory chip demand via its US$1.8 billion acquisition of...
Shanghai-based Harbour BioMed’s acquisition of a stake in US-based Spruce Biosciences is the latest example of China’s novel drug developers progressing from one-time licensing deals into long-lasting equity partnerships with overseas partners. The deal, detailed in a Hong Kong stock exchange filing on Monday, also showed Chinese firms’ growing clout on the global pharmaceutical stage, analysts said. “The coming years will see more Chinese biotech firms engaging in equity investments and joint...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] With its on-premises data center becoming increasingly costly and inflexible, The Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited (Towngas) set out to migrate to the cloud and establish a more efficient and scalable infrastructure for next-generation services. The company worked with AWS Partner eCloudvalley to transition its core systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and modernize its IT environment. As a result, Towngas reduced...
State-owned China Telecom has developed the country’s first artificial intelligence models with the innovative Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that are trained entirely on advanced chips from Huawei Technologies. This marked the first time a Chinese developer publicly validated the feasibility of using only Huawei chips to train AI models with MoE architecture, which has become widely adopted because of its ability to deliver high performance with fewer computational resources. The...
China’s commercial space sector logged 50 launches last year – more than half of the country’s total – underscoring the growing role of private players alongside the state-led space programme, with Beijing highlighting aerospace as a strategic industry. Commercial launches accounted for 54 per cent of the country’s total in 2025, according to data released on Tuesday by the China National Space Administration (CNSA). Of the total, 25 launches were carried out by commercial launch vehicles....
Chinese smartphone makers are bearing the brunt of a global memory crunch, slashing their 2026 shipment targets by tens of millions of units, according to industry supply chain sources. Beijing-based smartphone and electric vehicle giant Xiaomi cut its latest shipment forecast for the year by between 10 and 70 million units in its guidance for upstream suppliers, a source said. This follows a target of 180 million units the company had set in the fourth quarter of last year, the source...
New energy, artificial intelligence, electric vehicle (EV) and biotechnology companies will remain the driving force behind Hong Kong’s initial public offering (IPO) market in the coming years, according to the head of bourse operator Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX). “In the past year, dozens of new companies in green energy, automation and other sectors have listed in Hong Kong, enabling them to scale their research and global impact,” wrote Bonnie Chan Yiting, CEO of HKEX, in an...
The CEO of Chinese artificial intelligence company MiniMax met Premier Li Qiang on Monday, becoming the second representative from a foundational AI model developer to meet with the national leader after Liang Wenfeng, founder of DeepSeek, a year ago. The appearance of 36-year-old Yan Junjie along with eight other leading figures from China’s business, culture and education spheres underscored the rapid ascent of the newly minted billionaire, who steered his company founded just four years ago...
A group of researchers from China and Japan has challenged a method unveiled several months ago by Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek that was designed to improve AI’s ability to handle long blocks of text, marking a rare case of the company’s research being publicly questioned. The DeepSeek-OCR (optical character recognition) method, designed to compress text by using visual representations, potentially revolutionising how AI models handle long texts, was flawed due to...
China’s pursuit of commercial nuclear fusion technology has intensified this year, fuelled by a fresh round of financing for start-ups and state-backed initiatives. Startorus Fusion last week raised 1 billion yuan (US$143 million) from its series A round, a record for a single financing round by a private nuclear fusion company on the mainland, according to a report by the Securities Times. The deal, announced on January 12, was led by state-owned funds in Shanghai, which contributed around 400...
China has emerged as a credible challenger to the US in artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery, where advantage depends not only on computing prowess but also on the ability to effectively mine data, from genomes to clinical trial results, according to Leung Chuen-yan, a private equity investor and life sciences scientist. “Globally, the way companies develop and use AI to discover drugs is similar, from finding the drug target and designing the molecule to planning clinical trials,” said...
In a seismic shift for the global retail landscape, Temu, the budget shopping platform owned by PDD Holdings, has caught up with Amazon.com in cross-border market share globally. The platform, which launched in 2022, saw its share surge from less than 1 per cent then to 24 per cent last year, on par with American giant Amazon, according to a survey published by International Post Corporation (IPC), an association of 26 national postal services in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America. Amazon’s...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] Since their emergency-use rollout in late 2020, billions of doses of COVID 19 vaccines built on disruptive mRNA technology have been administered worldwide, saving hundreds of millions of lives. Now, the global pharmaceutical industry is pushing far beyond next generation vaccines. Companies worldwide are rapidly expanding into mRNA based therapeutics aimed at chronic and autoimmune diseases, rare genetic disorders,...
One year ago, a little-known Chinese start-up called DeepSeek burst onto the scene with a new artificial intelligence model that challenged assumptions about China’s ability to innovate under US technology curbs. In what became known as the “DeepSeek moment”, the Hangzhou-based firm kicked off what some likened as a modern-day “Sputnik moment” for China’s AI ambitions. Just as the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, shocked the US and triggered the...
China’s Unitree Robotics shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, as the Hangzhou-based company ramped up production ahead of its planned listing on the mainland. That number – covering “pure” full-body, bipedal humanoid models – exceeded those of its American peers such as Tesla, Figure AI and Agility Robotics, which shipped 150 humanoid robots each last year, according to market research firm Omdia. Unitree saw its annual output...
The shortages and associated price increase in the global memory chip sector could potentially intensify, as the US government threatened to impose hefty new tariffs on some major foreign manufacturers. Speaking at Friday’s groundbreaking ceremony for Micron Technology’s US$100 billion factory in New York, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warned that memory chipmakers – without naming any company – had two options: “They can pay 100 per cent tariff, or they can build in America.” He pointed...
The shortages and associated price increase in the global memory chip sector could potentially intensify, as the US government threatened to impose hefty new tariffs on some major foreign manufacturers. Speaking at Friday’s groundbreaking ceremony for Micron Technology’s US$100 billion factory in New York, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick warned that memory chipmakers – without naming any company – had two options: “They can pay 100 per cent tariff, or they can build in America.” Lutnick...
China’s top securities regulator has signalled it wants a slower, longer-lasting stock market rally rather than a short-lived speculative surge as it steps up measures to curb excessive trading after activity and margin financing hit fresh highs early this year. The stance, reiterated at a securities watchdog meeting last week, drew renewed attention after regulators moved to cool pockets of overheating in the A-share market following a strong start to 2026. At its January 15 work conference,...
Chinese humanoid developer UBTech Robotics has struck a deal to supply European aviation giant Airbus with robots for its manufacturing facilities, the latest step in efforts to expand industrial applications of its robots outside China. Airbus purchased UBTech’s Walker S2 robot as part of a plan to jointly explore robotics applications in aviation manufacturing, Shenzhen-based UBTech said in a statement on Sunday. The deal follows a similar partnership last month with US semiconductor maker...
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has unveiled a road map to introduce 20 measures under a five-year initiative aimed at modernising the city’s trade finance landscape and strengthening connectivity with mainland China and Asean trade corridors. Project CargoX, part of HKMA’s Fintech 2030 strategy, would use blockchain and data to help exporters secure bank loans more easily and strengthen Hong Kong’s role as an international trading hub, said Howard Lee Tat-chi, deputy chief executive of...
Chinese AI start-up DeepWisdom, which has launched its Atoms multi-agent application, wants to make life easier for solo entrepreneurs by deploying AI agents to serve in different roles, in what may be a glimpse of the future of work. “We want everyone to be able to realise their ideas at very low cost,” Alex Wu Chenglin, founder and CEO of DeepWisdom, said in an interview with the Post. “Each person can become one of the building blocks of society.” Previously known as MGX, Atoms allows users...
China’s pharmaceutical industry, whose revenue is projected to rise by 50 per cent between 2024 and 2030, has emerged as a new growth engine for the national economy as leading players ramp up investment in research and production. The country’s drug and medical device businesses were forecast to top US$2.1 trillion in revenue by 2030 and US$3.2 trillion annually by 2050, according to estimates by UBS. In 2024, the sector generated about US$1.4 trillion in sales. “An ageing population offers the...