Chinese technology powerhouses are beginning to reap early returns from their heavy investments in artificial intelligence, with quarterly results showing the impact across businesses from short video platforms like Kuaishou Technology to social media giants like Tencent Holdings. Kuaishou, China’s second-largest short video app and rival to TikTok’s Chinese sibling Douyin, was the latest to highlight gains from AI adoption. The company, in an earnings statement on Wednesday, attributed its...
While the Dutch government has offered goodwill in the dispute over control of Nexperia, a Chinese-owned, Netherlands-based chipmaker, the crisis is far from over. China’s Ministry of Commerce on Wednesday welcomed the Dutch government’s revocation of an executive order taking control of the firm. But it also noted that a Dutch court ruling remained a “key obstacle” to resolving the matter. Wingtech Technology, the Chinese owner of Nexperia, said it had yet to resume control of the chipmaker. In...
Lenovo Group, the world’s largest personal computer maker, is betting that its own artificial intelligence agent will help grow its AI-powered consumer electronics business, even as the industry faces a global memory chip supply crunch. Chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing on Thursday said the company would globally launch in January its “personal AI super agent”, which would leverage AI models to anticipate a user’s intentions via “portable devices and personal trusted computing hubs”. Beijing-based...
US chipmaker Nvidia said it is “disappointed” about current restrictions locking it out of China’s artificial intelligence market, but the company reported record revenues for the third quarter despite shrinking sales in the world’s second-largest economy. Nvidia reported a 62 per cent surge in total revenue to a record US$57 billion, even as its sales in China, including Hong Kong, plunged 63 per cent to US$3 billion in the three months ended October 26, according to the company’s financial...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] The AI (artificial intelligence) boom is rapidly transforming industries and creating new opportunities. In fact, even as markets experienced turmoil earlier this year, global investment in AI continued to accelerate. As society enters a new era in which AI matters for every investor, the question is, are their strategies evolving fast enough? How to invest in AI – and with AI Since 2019, Robeco has integrated...
Chinese search engine and artificial intelligence pioneer Baidu is casting AI as the engine of China’s push for “new productive forces”, touting the emerging technology as a linchpin of Beijing’s economic growth drive. “AI, as a key driver of the new wave of technological and industrial transformation, is vital for accelerating the emergence of new quality productive forces and achieving high-quality economic and social development,” said Robin Li Yanhong, founder and chief executive at...
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Wednesday shrugged off concerns about an artificial intelligence bubble as the company surprised Wall Street with accelerating growth after several quarters of slowing sales. The chipmaker’s stellar third-quarter earnings and fourth-quarter forecast calmed, at least temporarily, investor nerves over concerns an AI boom has outrun fundamentals. Global markets have looked to the chip designer to determine whether investing billions of dollars in AI infrastructure...
Yann LeCun, one of the founding figures of modern artificial intelligence and a pivotal force at Meta Platforms, said on Wednesday he plans to leave the company at the end of the year to launch a new AI start-up. LeCun has been a key part of Meta’s AI ambitions for more than a decade. He joined the company in 2013 to create Facebook AI Research (FAIR), the in-house lab that helped transform Meta into one of the AI leaders. Over 12 years, he served five as FAIR’s founding director and seven as...
Warning signs are flashing from experts, entrepreneurs and workers concerned that automation is coming for a wide range of information-oriented jobs. What ordinarily would be just another boom-bust cycle fuelled by computer-generated efficiency, a typewriter to keyboard type of evolution, is this time threatening to overturn the basic social contract between employers and employees. Unless and until this is taken seriously by policymakers, the modern middle class risks becoming a relic of...
The release of Google DeepMind’s latest artificial intelligence model has sparked debate about the future of US-China competition in AI and the ability of Chinese developers to keep up. Gemini 3 Pro, released on Tuesday, overtook OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 to give Google the top spot on leading AI benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis’ Intelligence Index for the first time. The model was roundly praised by fellow industry competitors, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Lin Junyang, the technical lead of...
China’s growing pipeline of novel drug candidates is expected to draw increased attention from global pharmaceutical companies and investors scouting for licensing opportunities, as the country’s clinical trial capacity has expanded to match those in the US. That assessment was made by Shanghai-based Helen Chen, Greater China managing partner at L.E.K. Consulting, one of the most respected analysts in the mainland’s life sciences industry. “There is increased interest from multinational...
UBTech Robotics says it plans to expand its assembly of humanoid robots 10-fold next year to as many as 5,000 units and double that to 10,000 in 2027, as the scale economics of China’s advanced manufacturing prowess shaves a fifth off production costs every year. The Shenzhen-based company was on track to deliver 500 humanoid robots for industrial use by the end of this year, scaling up since delivering the first 10 droids last year, UBTech’s chief branding officer Michael Tam said during an...
Some of China’s cryptocurrency heavyweights have called off a US$500 million ether digital asset treasury (DAT) project, as the broader crypto market remains in a slump, according to people familiar with the matter. The project was initiated earlier this year by Huobi founder Leon Li Lin, HashKey Group chairman and CEO Xiao Feng, Meitu co-founder Mike Cai Wensheng and Fenbushi Capital founder Bo Shen, who aimed to raise US$500 million to launch a DAT firm that would invest in the world’s...
China has cemented its position as a global leader in artificial intelligence, while Hong Kong is carving out a niche as a specialised innovation hub, underpinned by the country’s strong governance and regulatory competitiveness, according to a global index. Technology breakthroughs such as the low-cost, highly efficient AI models introduced by start-up DeepSeek, combined with national support, propelled China to the forefront of the global AI race, alongside the US, the European Union and...
DJI, the world leader in drone technology, plans to launch a “full-view” drone – a new genre that rival Insta360 is also developing – in a sign of fierce hardware competition among China’s gadget makers. The Shenzhen-based company conducted a preview of the product last week to give attendees a first-hand look at its new 360-degree drone, named Avata 360, and to share the company’s views on industry competition and market prospects, the Guangdong financial newspaper 21st Century Business Herald...
Alibaba Group Holding founder Jack Ma on Tuesday made a low-key visit to the Hangzhou campus of Ant Group that coincided with the Chinese fintech giant’s launch of LingGuang, a next-generation multimodal artificial intelligence assistant. Ma, who had relinquished his control of the fintech company and resigned from all corporate roles at Alibaba, was seen accompanied by Ant Group chairman Eric Jing Xiandong and CEO Cyril Han Xinyi during his tour of the campus. Ant Group is an affiliate of...
Wall Street will get a sense of where the billions of dollars being spent on artificial intelligence are going when Nvidia Corp reports its earnings after the bell on Wednesday. How the sinking stock market will react is another question. “This is a ‘so goes Nvidia, so goes the market’ kind of report,” said Scott Martin, chief investment officer at Kingsview Wealth Management, which owns shares of Nvidia and several of its Big Tech peers. Analysts expect the Nasdaq-listed semiconductor behemoth...
The ambitious spending plans of artificial intelligence developers coupled with rapid user adoption indicate the global rally in their stocks will persist despite bubble concerns, fund managers at Fidelity International and Allianz Global Investors said. The recent downturn in global semiconductor stocks, ahead of Nvidia’s closely watched earnings later this week, was likely to be temporary, according to Joseph Zhang, portfolio manager at Fidelity International. Unless AI capital spending or...
Microsoft and Nvidia plan to invest in Anthropic under a new tie-up that includes a US$30 billion commitment by the Claude maker to use Microsoft’s cloud services, the latest high-profile deal binding together major players in the artificial intelligence industry. Nvidia would commit up to US$10 billion to Anthropic and Microsoft up to US$5 billion, the companies said on Tuesday, without sharing more details. A person familiar with the matter said both companies had committed to investing in...
Alphabet’s Google debuted an updated version of its artificial intelligence model, Gemini, that executives said represented a “massive jump” in reasoning and coding ability. The new model, Gemini 3, will be available immediately across all of Google’s major products, including search, and can answer questions with interactive graphics. Gemini 3, like its predecessor, could process text, images and other media as well as solve complex science and maths problems, the company said. It had...
Chinese artificial intelligence scientist Yang Hongxia, a professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), is seeking to democratise large language models (LLMs) by empowering hospitals and various enterprises to train their own AI systems. Yang, who previously worked on AI models at ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding’s Damo Academy, said in a recent interview with the South China Morning Post that her newly formed start-up, InfiX.ai, envisioned a world in which various businesses could...
Chinese electric vehicle (EV) makers from Xpeng to Chery Automobile, leveraging their technological and manufacturing strength, are intensifying efforts to build humanoid robots as they position themselves as potential game-changers amid Beijing’s ambitions to gain an upper hand over the US in the hi-tech sector. Guangzhou-based Xpeng said it envisioned sales of 1 million units by 2030 after its next-generation humanoid robot Iron won praise from Tesla CEO Elon Musk early this month. He...
Facebook parent company Meta Platforms defeated a US attempt to unwind its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp on Tuesday when a federal judge ruled the company did not hold a social media monopoly. The ruling gives Big Tech its first decisive win against the antitrust crackdown started in US President Donald Trump’s first term, and is a major setback for the Federal Trade Commission, which is pursuing a separate antitrust case against Amazon.com. The agency sought to force Meta to...
Chinese internet search giant Baidu on Tuesday reported a 50 per cent increase in artificial intelligence-related revenue in the three months ended September from a year ago, which was the bright spot to an otherwise lacklustre financial quarter. The Beijing-based company’s third-quarter revenue declined 7 per cent year on year to 31.2 billion yuan (US$4.4 billion), owing to sluggish demand in its advertising business, while its net loss hit 11.2 billion yuan on asset writedowns. While its core...
Alibaba Group Holding’s new multipurpose artificial intelligence consumer app, Qwen, has the potential to become China’s “super-app” in the AI era in the same way Tencent Holdings’ WeChat defined the mobile internet age, analysts say. Powered by Alibaba Cloud’s own model series of the same name, Qwen quickly jumped to fourth overall on Apple’s app store for free apps in Hong Kong and fifth in mainland China on its second day of beta testing. The app, billed as “the best personal AI assistant”,...
Cloudflare has fully restored its services after an outage on Tuesday at the web-infrastructure company prevented thousands from accessing major internet platforms, including X and ChatGPT. The company said the outage that began around 6.30am was caused by an automatically generated configuration file, designed to manage potential security threats. The file grew too large and crashed the software system handling traffic for several Cloudflare services, the company, whose network handles around a...
Huawei Technologies is set to launch its latest flagship smartphone, the Mate 80 series, and a new foldable handset next Tuesday, as industry speculation swirls over the use of its next-generation Kirin 9030 processor in these devices. The Shenzhen-based telecommunications equipment maker on Monday said its new Mate series – including the basic Mate 80, Mate 80 Pro, Mate 80 Pro Max and Mate 80 RS models – would be available for pre-order, but pricing and technical specifications were not...
Chinese technology company Xiaomi says it has turned a profit from its electric vehicle (EV) and artificial intelligence businesses in the third quarter, marking the first time the units have swung into black, with overall profits surging nearly 81 per cent from a year earlier. The smartphone-to-EV giant’s adjusted net profit in the three months ended September 30 reached 11.3 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion), according to its earnings release on Tuesday. The pre-adjustment profit surged 129.5 per...
Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said no company would be unscathed if the artificial intelligence boom collapses, as soaring valuations and heavy investment in the sector fuel concerns of a bubble. Pichai said in an interview with the BBC published on Tuesday that the current wave of AI investment was an “extraordinary moment” but acknowledged “elements of irrationality” in the market, echoing warnings of “irrational exuberance” during the dotcom era. There has also been much debate among...
Bitcoin continues to plunge as a cryptocurrency sell-off deepens, shaving off gains in share prices that some Hong Kong-listed firms made this year after launching digital asset initiatives. Bitcoin at one point on Tuesday dropped below US$90,000, more than 4 per cent lower than at the start of 2025, after hitting multiple all-time highs this year. The world’s largest cryptocurrency had “underperformed both gold and the Nasdaq amid risk-off sentiment and tight liquidity, exacerbated by the...
Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com has opened a new front in China’s intensifying on-demand local services war, rolling out a stand-alone food-delivery app and a “JD Review” platform for what it says are genuine, non-commercialised user ratings, in a direct challenge to Meituan and Alibaba Group Holding-backed services. The twin launches mark JD.com’s latest attempt to claw back relevance in instant commerce, a fast-growing segment where Meituan and Alibaba have consolidated dominant positions,...
The bitcoin rally that welcomed a wave of new investors through easy-to-access exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has officially gone underwater. Investors in US ETFs that offer direct access to the cryptocurrency are now sitting on collective losses. The average cost basis across all ETF inflows sits at approximately US$89,600 – a level bitcoin breached on Tuesday, according to Sean Rose at market intelligence firm Glassnode. That figure reflects the flow-weighted average price of all ETF inflows...
Fintech giant Ant Group, an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, has unveiled what it called China’s first multimodal artificial intelligence assistant capable of producing code-driven outputs, including “flash apps” in as little as 30 seconds. LingGuang, described as a next-generation multimodal AI assistant, was designed to help users create a variety of simple apps – including a calorie tracker, a Pac-Man-style game and a Chinese character memorisation tool – based on natural language prompts,...
US video game developer Riot Games, creator of League of Legends, retains bragging rights to the most popular PC game in China nearly a decade and a half after its launch. First introduced in 2009 and brought to the mainland in 2011, the multiplayer online battle game has been around longer than many of those who play it – a remarkable feat in an industry known for its rapid shifts. The secret to the game’s longevity may lie in the sustained appeal of the League of Legends esports scene, as...
The recovery of China’s tech stocks from their trough is still at an early stage, as the country’s emergence as an artificial intelligence superpower reshapes global platforms and lures Western capital back, according to a senior investment banker at JPMorgan. As Chinese entrepreneurs expanded their businesses globally and deepened their involvement in AI, their companies and fundraising plans were once again drawing the attention of international investors after years of stagnation, said Mark...
China’s market regulator has moved to tackle the hidden risks of algorithm-driven price manipulation with newly proposed anti-monopoly guidelines for online shopping, food delivery and travel platforms. A draft of the “Anti-Monopoly Compliance Guidelines for Internet Platforms”, published over the weekend by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), focused heavily on the sophisticated, often opaque ways in which online platforms with significant market power can exploit...
Leading Chinese electric-vehicle (EV) maker Xpeng reported record quarterly revenue and sharply narrowed losses in the third quarter, even as its Hong Kong-listed shares fell on Monday after investors shrugged off a bullish call from JPMorgan. The Guangzhou-based firm’s net loss narrowed by nearly 80 per cent to 380.9 million yuan (US$53.6 million) in the third quarter from 1.81 billion yuan a year earlier, according to a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange. Revenue surged 101.8 per cent year...
China’s e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding and JD.com reported record-breaking sales for the Singles’ Day online shopping festival, as the companies looked to artificial intelligence to help boost sales and traffic amid a sluggish economy. During the event, which ran for almost a month from mid-October, Alibaba’s online retail platforms Taobao and Tmall saw more than 34,000 brands double their sales from a year ago, the company said on Saturday. More than 18,000 brands recorded sales growth...
Ant International, the Singapore-based spin-off of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, is stepping up its global treasury operations through a strategic partnership with Swiss bank UBS, as both companies also seek to explore innovations in blockchain-based tokenised deposits. Under a memorandum of understanding signed at UBS’ Singapore offices, Ant International will use UBS Digital Cash – a blockchain-based payments platform launched last year – for its global treasury operations to enhance...
Alibaba Group Holding has officially launched its multipurpose artificial intelligence app, Qwen, promising a “free-for-all” gateway for consumers to access a variety of AI-powered services, from mapping to shopping. Qwen, powered by Alibaba Cloud’s open-source model series of the same name and marketed as “the best personal AI assistant”, serves not only as a chatbot but also as a comprehensive AI tool designed to meet user needs in both professional and personal contexts, the company said on...
Chinese technology giant Huawei Technologies is expected to unveil a new artificial intelligence infrastructure technology on Friday that could double the utilisation efficiency of graphic processing units (GPUs), according to the state-owned Shanghai Securities News. The report said the technology would be able to lift the utilisation rate of AI chips – including GPUs and neural processing units (NPUs) – to 70 per cent, up from the current 30 to 40 per cent, in another major advance in “using...
Unitree Robotics, one of China’s leading humanoid robot manufacturers, has completed its pre-initial public offering (IPO) tutoring process in only four months, a major step towards an onshore listing amid Beijing’s push for technological self-reliance and advancement, according to government documents. The Hangzhou-based unicorn passed regulatory checks with the Zhejiang Securities Regulatory Bureau, concluding a pre-listing tutoring period that began on July 18, the China Securities Regulatory...
Just a little more than a month after reaching an all-time high, bitcoin has erased the more than 30 per cent gain registered since the start of the year as the exuberance over the pro-crypto stance of the Trump administration fades. The dominant cryptocurrency fell below US$93,714 on Sunday, pushing the price beneath the closing level reached at the end of last year, when financial markets were rallying following US President Donald Trump’s election victory. Bitcoin soared to a record...
Alibaba Group Holding has begun a revamp of its artificial intelligence chatbot in a move to match OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to app store information and media reports, as some observers see “panic” in Silicon Valley over the Chinese tech giant’s rapid AI progress. The new chatbot app, Qwen, an upgraded and renamed version of the previous app, Tongyi, became available on Android and Apple app stores on Friday. Alibaba dubbed the updated app the “most powerful official AI assistant for its...
China’s premier metropolis has a vision for the future of dining – and it is one involving restaurants run by artificial intelligence, with automated kitchens, robot servers, data-driven menus and intelligent supply chains. The spread of automation in the catering sector has become a hot-button issue in China over recent months, but Shanghai appears committed to charging ahead with a plan to transform local eateries using smart technology. The city has set a target of becoming a “nationally...
The use of chips for artificial intelligence and electric vehicles (EVs) will offer strong demand underpinning the development of mainland China’s semiconductor industry, according to veterans of the sector at an annual gathering in Shanghai. At the 2025 Global Semiconductor Market Summit, chip executives discussed the industry’s future amid US-China tech rivalry and surging demand for chips, as well as different technology trajectories. The two-day event, which wrapped up on Friday, was...
Chinese merchants who sell to overseas markets via popular sites like Shein and Temu are struggling with escalating tax and compliance burdens from both their main export market, the European Union, and the domestic tax authority. The latest pressure came from the EU, which on Thursday agreed to abolish a rule that allowed goods worth less than €150 (US$174) to enter the region without customs duties. The new rule will apply once an EU customs data hub is ready, scheduled for 2028. However, the...
Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, opened positions in two of China’s leading autonomous driving companies in the third quarter of this year. The state-owned company bought about 1.4 million shares of WeRide and 14,500 shares of Pony.ai in the September quarter, according to its 13F filings released on Friday. The total value of the shares was around US$13.7 million. Temasek has a history of investing in autonomous driving companies. These included...
Alibaba Group Holding on Saturday dismissed a Financial Times report alleging its connection with the Chinese military and questioned if the accusation was an attempt to sabotage US President Donald Trump’s recent deal with Beijing. The report said Alibaba was supplying the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with unspecified capabilities that the White House claimed would threaten US national security, citing a memo that included declassified top-secret intelligence. “The assertions and innuendos in...
The Nexperia factory in Dongguan, in the heart of southern China’s Pearl River Delta, has long been a poster child for successful globalisation. Since its launch in 2000, the plant, which covers an area the size of 10 football fields, has operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week, non-stop. Following its most recent upgrade in 2018, its annual production capacity surged to 90 billion units, making it the largest assembly site in the Chinese-owned Dutch chipmaker’s global network. Yet, this...