A mild uptick in bitcoin mining in China has prompted calls for Beijing to loosen its restrictions and let the power-hungry industry tap into the country’s oversupply of energy, but experts said the likelihood of China ending its mining ban was low. China’s bitcoin mining market share by hash rate rose from 13.75 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 to 14.06 per cent in the current quarter, making it the third largest bitcoin mining country behind the US and Russia, according to Hashrate Index,...
Chinese artificial intelligence start-ups Moonshot AI and MiniMax have emerged as China’s strongest contenders to rival US frontier labs in 2025 – even as DeepSeek has stolen the spotlight as the poster child for the country’s AI ambitions. Moonshot AI, founded by 33-year-old Yang Zhilin, has sharply raised its profile in China’s AI ecosystem with the launch earlier this month of Kimi K2 Thinking, an upgraded reasoning model. The system outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet...
When Alvin Kwock, co-founder of digital insurer OneDegree, took part in the inaugural Hong Kong FinTech Week in November 2016, it was held at a venue suitable for only a few hundred people. “As it was the first ever fintech event in Hong Kong, only fintech start-ups were interested, no big financial institutions paid attention,” Kwock said. “People did not have a clear idea of fintech as it was still in an exploratory stage.” In the years since, fintech in Hong Kong has gone through a sea...
Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek has released the world’s first open AI model to test and score a gold medal-level performance at the annual International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the Hangzhou-based start-up said on Thursday. DeepSeek has made widely available its Math-V2 model, which was open-sourced on developer platforms Hugging Face and GitHub, under a permissive licence that allows users to repurpose the model. Held annually since 1959, the IMO is widely regarded as the...
A fierce war of words has erupted between Dutch chipmaker Nexperia and its Chinese owner, Wingtech Technology, after China and the European Union signalled that their dispute should be resolved at the corporate level. Wingtech accused Nexperia’s head office of being insincere after the Dutch head office publicly released a letter that said the chipmaker’s Chinese unit had been unresponsive to requests for talks. The heightened tensions underscore the complexity in resolving the two sides’...
China’s food-delivery giant Meituan swung to a deep quarterly loss, as a costly battle with Alibaba Group Holding’s instant commerce business eroded margins and kept revenue growth modest. The Beijing-based company on Friday reported revenue of 95.5 billion yuan (US$13.3 billion) for the three months to September, up 2 per cent year on year, missing analysts' estimates of 97.5 billion yuan. However, it booked an operating loss of 19.8 billion yuan, compared with a 13.7 billion yuan operating...
A research team led by Alibaba Cloud was the only group from China to receive a top award at this year’s NeurIPS, or the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, billed as the artificial intelligence industry’s most prestigious annual event. The research could lead to drastic improvements in the efficiency of large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing both training and inference costs for Alibaba Group Holding’s next generation of Qwen models without sacrificing...
Chinese regulations that propose tighter technical specs for portable power banks are stirring unease among producers and consumers, as they could mean passengers are no longer allowed to bring such products on board flights. According to a draft document from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which is soliciting feedback until December 11, all Chinese portable power banks would be required to disclose their battery type, production date and offer a recommendation for...
As fears over the artificial intelligence bubble bursting linger in global markets, one Southeast Asian tech founder thinks it could be a much-needed reset to a crowded space. Dylan Tan, founder of replyr.ai, a Singapore-based start-up that creates AI WhatsApp sales agents for its clients, said there was a disconnect between the investor hype driving up tech stocks and an understanding of how AI would transform the future of businesses. Replyr.ai was founded with venture capitalist funds in...
Researchers from artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek and tech giant Alibaba Group Holding have endorsed China’s emerging AI regulatory framework while calling for clearer feedback in a paper published in the US journal Science. The paper, published last month under the title “China’s emerging regulation towards an open future for AI”, said the country had so far facilitated an “innovation- and openness-friendly institutional environment for AI developers” but that it could be further...
Chinese onshore investor frenzy for artificial intelligence chips has intensified, with the initial public offering (IPO) of Beijing-based graphics processing unit (GPU) maker Moore Threads drawing more than 4,000 times subscription from retail investors this week. The red-hot demand for Moore Threads highlights China’s determination to build home-grown alternatives to Nvidia’s chips, and is expected to accelerate listing plans for other domestic GPU developers, from MetaX to Biren...
Alibaba Group Holding on Thursday launched its first artificial intelligence glasses in China, as the tech giant seeks to carve out a solid niche in the growing smart wearables market. The Quark AI Glasses, named after the company’s Quark AI assistant, include three versions each of the series’ flagship S1 model and the lightweight G1 model. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. “AI glasses are the intelligent devices that truly usher in a revolution in human-computer interaction in the AI...
UBS has warned of greater market volatility next year, citing risks ranging from weaker-than-expected artificial intelligence revenue to geopolitical tensions, but the Swiss investment bank remains bullish about Chinese technology shares and gold. UBS identified five major market risks for next year: economic weakness, a resurgence of inflation, government debts, renewed US-China conflicts, and disappointing returns from AI after three years of heavy investment. “One point that we can be very...
Xiaomi has hired a former engineer from Tesla’s Optimus team, Zach Lu Zeyu, to join the Chinese tech giant’s robotics initiatives, as the talent grab in the industry intensifies. Lu, previously a senior robotics engineer focused on the Optimus humanoid robot, joined Xiaomi last month to lead the Beijing-based firm’s dexterous hand research and development operations, according to his LinkedIn page. During his two years at Tesla, Lu worked on the design for dexterous grasping and manipulation, as...
Chinese tech giant Baidu is cutting an undisclosed number of jobs across major divisions and restructuring artificial intelligence teams, as the company moves to streamline operations following a loss-making quarter, according to multiple sources. Baidu has axed staff in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, affecting multiple major business units from its mobile ecosystem group, which includes its bread-and-butter search business, to intelligent cloud and technology platform groups, according to...
The Jack Ma Foundation said on Thursday it would donate HK$30 million (US$3.9 million) to support families, firefighters and rescuers affected by a deadly fire at a housing estate in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district. In a statement, the foundation – established by the founder of Alibaba Group Holding and Ant Group – expressed solidarity with all those affected by the tragedy. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. The donation follows a further commitment of HK$20 million from Alibaba and HK$10...
The rapid and enthusiastic adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is already having a seismic effect on industries around the world, enabling new efficiencies and bringing fundamental change to the way organisations plan and operate. Importantly, but perhaps not yet widely recognised, the impact of this tech revolution is also being seen in many areas of the natural resources sector – including mining, oil and gas, chemicals and building materials – where the latest advances are reshaping core...
Hong Kong’s first locally developed artificial intelligence chatbot, HKChat, has raised expectations that it could compete with more popular and established AI apps, as it racked up around 90,000 users in the city within a week of its low-key release. HKChat is focused on providing information on local services, including real-time bus arrivals, as well as the city’s weather, laws and regulations. It was the top-ranked free app on Apple’s Hong Kong App Store on Sunday, according to data from app...
There remains considerable potential to enhance artificial intelligence models by scaling up computing power and data, according to Yao Shunyu, a senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind and former researcher at US AI start-up Anthropic. Amid heated discussions in the AI community about the future of scaling – the process of increasing computational resources and training data to develop better AI models – Yao said the method was still expected to yield results for at least a year...
E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding expects to stay ahead of its Chinese Big Tech peers in artificial intelligence-related capital expenditure, as the firm’s AI and cloud computing unit posted its fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. Alibaba Cloud on Tuesday reported a 34 per cent year-on-year revenue growth to 39.8 billion yuan (US$5.6 billion) in the three months ended September 30, as the Hangzhou-based parent’s overall revenue in its financial second quarter reached...
Chinese AI chip start-up Zhonghao Xinying has emerged as a home-grown alternative to Nvidia with a new tensor processing unit (TPU), just as Google shakes up Nvidia’s lock on the market by selling its in-house tensor chips directly to major tech firms. The Hangzhou-based firm, also known as CL Tech, said its self-developed general-purpose tensor processing unit (GPTPU) went into mass production as early as 2023. Its flagship chip, dubbed Chana, delivers up to “1.5 times the compute performance”...
In China’s tech hub Hangzhou, visitors to a country park can rent an exoskeleton to aid their climb for as little as 1 yuan (14 US cents). The exoskeleton is said to make the hiking process almost “effortless”, according to Chinese social media users.
TikTok said Tuesday it had named former Boeing government affairs chief Ziad Ojakli as the short video app’s head of public policy for the Americas as it works to complete a deal to separate its US assets from its parent company. The move comes as TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance is working to sell about an 80 per cent stake in its US assets to a consortium of US and global investors to meet the national security requirements set out in a 2024 law. President Donald Trump signed an executive...
Meta Platforms is in talks to spend billions on Google’s AI chips, according to a report by The Information, adding to a months-long share rally as the search giant has made the case it can rival Nvidia as a leader in artificial intelligence technology. A deal would signal growing momentum for Google’s chips and long-term potential to challenge Nvidia’s market dominance, after the company earlier agreed to supply up to 1 million chips to Anthropic. Google owner Alphabet is on track to hit a US$4...
Volkswagen Group has ramped up its “all in” strategy for China, banking on local development capabilities and a new electric vehicle (EV) architecture to fight back against domestic rivals and regain its leading position in the world’s largest vehicle market. The German carmaker’s China operations are now able to design and validate new models without going through approvals from headquarters, reducing development time and costs to respond quickly to local needs. On Tuesday, the company...
US and Chinese artificial intelligence players are ramping up integration of e-commerce solutions in their flagship consumer products in a race to become the “everything app” of the future. OpenAI on Monday unveiled a “shopping research” tool. The function, which can generate detailed shopping guides for ChatGPT users, comes just before the busy holiday shopping season and resembles popular AI shopping services on Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Tmall and Taobao of Alibaba Group Holding....
On Saturday, the Beijing-based start-up LandSpace reportedly plans to conduct the maiden launch of its Zhuque-3 rocket – a reusable launch vehicle that could significantly boost China’s space industry by lowering the cost of lifting equipment such as satellites into orbit. The prospect of China mastering reusable rockets – a technology pioneered by US-based SpaceX – has attracted significant attention from aerospace experts, and even drew comment from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk last month. Beyond the...
UBTech Robotics, one of China’s top robot manufacturers, said on Tuesday it had secured a major contract to deploy humanoids at border crossings to perform tasks such as guiding travellers, conducting inspections and handling logistics, as the country intensified efforts to apply robotics in the real world. The company has struck a 264 million yuan (US$37 million) deal with a humanoid robot centre in Fangchenggang, a coastal city in the southern autonomous region of Guangxi, which shares a...
AI Singapore (AISG) – a national programme by the city state of Singapore to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence – has chosen to base its latest large language model on Alibaba’s Qwen, in a significant win for the Chinese technology giant as it promotes its AI services in Southeast Asia. AI Singapore, designed to enhance the city state’s national AI capabilities, had released a new model, Qwen-SEA-LION-v4, based on Alibaba’s Qwen3-32B foundation model to better address the...
Alibaba Group Holding, China’s e-commerce and cloud computing giant, on Tuesday reported a better-than-expected 5 per cent increase in revenue for the September quarter, as its cloud and artificial intelligence businesses continued to gain momentum. Total revenue for the Hangzhou-based company reached 247.8 billion yuan (US$34.8 billion) for its financial second quarter ended September 30, beating the consensus estimate of 245.2 billion yuan by Bloomberg-polled analysts. That was more than the 2...
Huawei Technologies on Tuesday revealed that its next-generation Kirin 9030 system-on-a-chip powers the more advanced models of its newly launched 5G Mate 80 series smartphones. Shenzhen-based Huawei listed the Kirin 9030 as the processor for the 12-gigabyte random access memory (RAM) version of the Mate 80 Pro, while its Kirin 9030 Pro version is built into the 16GB RAM Mate 80 Pro, the Mate 80 Pro Max and Mate 80 RS models, according to the official website for the company’s latest flagship...
Young Chinese consumers, including a growing number of men, are splurging on aesthetic medical treatments for physical, emotional and social wellness, according to the CEO of Fosun Pharma‑backed Sisram Medical and its subsidiary Alma, who says Asia’s relatively low penetration offers greater growth potential than North America. “It is a global trend that younger generations, including those [in mainland China] and Hong Kong, are turning to energy-based aesthetic treatments such as lasers as a...
UBTech Robotics, one of China’s top makers of humanoid robots, plans to raise HK$3.11 billion (US$399.6 million) through a share placement in Hong Kong – its sixth and largest such fundraising since last year, riding on growing industrial orders and the sector’s momentum. The Shenzhen-based company aimed to sell 31,468,000 new shares for HK$98.80 each, representing a discount of around 11.4 per cent from the closing price on Monday, according to a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange on...
Bitcoin mining is quietly staging a comeback in China despite being banned four years ago, as individual and corporate miners exploit cheap electricity and a data-centre boom in some energy-rich provinces, according to miners and industry data. China had been the world’s biggest crypto mining country until Beijing banned all cryptocurrency trading and mining in 2021, citing threats to the country’s financial stability and energy conservation. After its global bitcoin mining market share slumped...
Anthropic is rolling out a new version of its most powerful artificial intelligence model that is designed to be better at automating coding and office tasks, part of an effort to compete with OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google for business customers. The new model, Claude Opus 4.5, was more capable than previous versions at software engineering work, like fixing bugs, without needing a user’s help, Anthropic said. Opus 4.5, released on Monday, is also intended to be better at carrying out complicated...
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) appointed Unitree Robotics founder Wang Xingxing and AgiBot co-founder Peng Zhihui to a national humanoid robotics committee, alongside other entrepreneurs and scholars. Wang and Peng – hailed as robotics’ “twin stars” – joined as vice-directors of the Standardisation Technical Committee for Humanoid Robots, which would be led by MIIT chief engineer Xie Shaofeng, according to an announcement on Monday. The committee’s 65 members...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] AWS has officially rolled out Kiro, its AI-enabled programming platform designed around spec-driven development, marking the end of its preview period and expanding access globally. Alongside general availability, AWS has launched a Kiro Startup Credits Program, offering eligible early-stage to Series B companies up to one year of complimentary Kiro Pro+ usage through the AWS Startups network. Kiro: From preview to...
A US non-profit has released a suite of “fully open” artificial intelligence models – disclosing its training data and pipelines in full – in a bid to challenge Chinese dominance in the open-source AI arena. The Allen Institute for AI, also known as Ai2, on Thursday released the latest Olmo series of models with their full training data and training pipelines available for public inspection. The move goes beyond the common practice of Chinese open-source AI developers, who typically make only...
Hong Kong-based Tykhe Capital Group and Malaysia’s Skyvast Digital have launched a US$150 million tokenised fund that offers investors exposure to artificial intelligence infrastructure, using an innovative arrangement designed to share project revenues and boost liquidity. SKYD Token was “the world’s first global-grade AI infrastructure tokenised fund”, Tykhe’s subsidiary, Pioneer Asset Management, and AI infrastructure developer Skyvast said in a press release on Monday. The fund will provide...
China has made significant progress in artificial intelligence hardware as the country’s top memory chipmaker has joined Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix to supply some of the world’s most advanced products. ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) on Sunday unveiled its new Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM) products with high frequency and expanded memory, which are vital for state-of-the-art AI computing servers and stacks. The DRAM chips were released at the...
Alibaba Group Holding’s new multipurpose artificial intelligence app, Qwen, recorded more than 10 million downloads in the first week of its public beta launch, faster than OpenAI’s ChatGPT or DeepSeek, the company said on Monday. The strong debut of Qwen, launched last week, augured well for the Chinese tech conglomerate’s efforts to establish a major AI assistant that would rival the performance of Google’s Gemini chatbot and ChatGPT, both of which are not available in mainland China. The Hong...
Wingtech Technology, the Chinese owner of Nexperia, said it had received no meaningful reply after reaching out to the Dutch chipmaker’s headquarters for talks. “It is deeply regrettable and puzzling that, despite our utmost sincerity, the Dutch side of Nexperia has not made any substantive response to our proposal for communication,” Wingtech said on Sunday. The Shanghai-listed company did not disclose the details of its outreach efforts, but urged Nexperia’s headquarters to present “a...
The race to develop artificial intelligence has pushed governments and technology giants to build new electricity plants and upgrade their decades-old grid networks, creating significant opportunities for Chinese power equipment companies, according to analysts. Chinese firms have been benefiting from the spillover of a US order boom, which was driven by US President Donald Trump’s push for tech leaders like Meta and SoftBank to invest in AI infrastructure. “The US buys products from Japan and...
Hong Kong’s push to establish a tokenised financial system is poised to attract more companies to set up treasury centres in the city, which would give investors broader options while reducing transaction costs, according to market players. Both corporations and individuals stood to benefit from increased tokenisation of money and assets, which could make financial services faster and more efficient and accessible, said representatives from Standard Chartered, China Asset Management (Hong Kong)...
The artificial intelligence-led stock rally in China is far from a bubble, as the nation’s technology firms still have room to expand valuations and earnings through their focus on applications, according to Goldman Sachs’ chief China equity strategist. China’s approach to investing more capital in AI applications as opposed to the US strategy of focusing on computing power gave investors “comfort that its AI monetisation capability could be better, at least in the short term”, Kinger Lau said...
Ant Group’s new “vibe coding” artificial intelligence app LingGuang has overwhelmed servers after user downloads surpassed 1 million in just four days, hitting the milestone faster than OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora, according to the Chinese fintech giant. The app’s innovative functionality of generating applications in response to users’ text prompts was temporarily suspended on Thursday evening, with the company attributing the issue to excessive usage in a post on Weibo. As of Saturday, LingGuang...
Xiaomi has open-sourced a new foundation model that integrates autonomous driving and embodied artificial intelligence, as the Chinese smartphone and electric-vehicle (EV) manufacturer seeks to enhance its AI capabilities. MiMo-Embodied, which comes after Xiaomi’s first large language model MiMo launched in April, was described as the “first open-source vision-language model” that combined autonomous driving and embodied AI tasks. Technical reports and project files are available on platforms...
The steep rise in memory chip prices is expected to continue on the back of heightened demand from the artificial intelligence industry, while average consumers are likely to pay more for a new smartphone, according to analysts. Memory chip prices were forecast to increase 30 per cent in the fourth quarter this year and a further 20 per cent in 2026, following a 50 per cent surge year to date, Counterpoint Research said in a report on Thursday. The higher cost reflects the rapid shift in...
US officials are having early discussions on whether to let Nvidia sell its H200 artificial intelligence chips to China, according to people familiar with the matter, a contentious potential move that would mark a major win for the world’s most valuable company. US President Donald Trump’s team had held internal talks about H200 chip shipments to the Asian country in recent days, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss a highly sensitive matter. No final decision had been made, the...
When Dutch authorities seized control of chipmaker Nexperia almost two months ago, it resulted in a clash between the head office in Nijmegen and the company’s mainland China unit, which vowed to operate and meet orders as an independent enterprise. That dispute also exposed the vulnerability of global car supply chains, as any disruption in Nexperia’s shipments of so-called legacy chips would affect nearly every major European carmaker, as well as those in Japan and the United States. Here are...