A number of mainland-based suppliers of memory chips and storage solutions are pursuing share listings in Hong Kong, signalling a strategic change in how the sector aims to fuel its global ambitions, according to analysts. The most watched firm is Shanghai-based Montage Technology, a designer of high-speed interconnect chips for data centres, which is taking orders from institutional investors and is set to debut on the Hong Kong stock exchange on Monday. Montage, which listed in Shanghai in...
Hong Kong’s banking regulator has unveiled four flagship projects, including a quantum computing readiness index, to help the city’s lenders stay competitive and secure in the artificial intelligence era. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) said the initiatives formed part of its new Fintech Promotion Blueprint, aimed at guiding responsible innovation and preparing the city’s banking sector for rapid technological change. The blueprint was announced on Tuesday in response to industry...
Chinese robotics firms continue to secure fresh financing, including from state-backed funds, as investors shift focus from hardware to the “brains” of humanoids – the software and operating systems that underpin their intelligence. Alongside hardware-centric companies like Unitree Robotics, a new wave of firms is emerging with capital directed towards robotic software and operating systems. Shenzhen-based humanoid robot maker LimX Dynamics announced on Monday the completion of its US$200...
French police raided the Paris offices of social media platform X on Tuesday as prosecutors summoned its owner Elon Musk for questioning over a widening investigation into alleged offences, including the spread of child pornography and deepfakes. The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed the search was part of a probe opened in January last year by its cybercrime unit, conducted in coordination with the EU police agency Europol. In a major escalation of the legal scrutiny facing the platform...
Chinese artificial intelligence start-up StepFun has unveiled a lightweight AI model that it says punches above its weight, rivalling larger systems from domestic competitors including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI as competition intensifies in the country’s AI sector. The Shanghai-based AI lab said on Monday its latest Step 3.5 Flash model was designed to deliver advanced reasoning and agentic capabilities while maintaining efficiency. Despite its relatively modest size of about 196 billion...
Uber Technologies is rolling out its ride-hailing service in the Chinese gambling hub of Macau, expanding into a new Asian market for the first time in years. Riders from Tuesday would be able to book and pay for taxis in the city using multiple languages, the US-based company said in a statement. It would also offer a limousine service between Macau and neighbouring Hong Kong, though trips had to be booked 24 hours in advance, it said. The move marks Uber’s first new entry to an Asian market...
Chinese open-source artificial intelligence models are being adopted by OpenClaw, the global hit AI agent, for their favourable balance of cost and performance, according to industry experts. OpenClaw, which has been a runaway success since its late 2025 launch, announced on Friday that it was offering Chinese start-up Moonshot AI’s latest Kimi K2.5 and Kimi Coding agent for free in its service, while adding support for MiniMax, another Chinese foundational AI developer. Analysts said Chinese...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] Every year, more than eight million people around the world anxiously wait for accurate diagnoses of debilitating gastrointestinal (GI) diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Yet definitive diagnosis often requires time-consuming, costly tests and invasive procedures – barriers that can discourage patients from seeking help early, when intervention is most effective. Responding to this urgent global need for...
Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings aims to replicate the success of WeChat Pay by splashing cash for its artificial intelligence app Yuanbao, but analysts are sceptical about whether subsidies can move the needle in the increasingly crowded market. Yuanbao’s 1 billion yuan (US$144 million) promotional campaign, which gives out cash through digital red packets to drive adoption, kicked off with a high-profile launch on Sunday, as many users woke up to find their WeChat groups flooded with...
Hong Kong’s cryptocurrency investors remain cautiously optimistic despite a sharp market sell-off over the weekend that pushed major digital assets to months-long lows. Bitcoin slid to US$74,541 on Monday morning, its lowest level in 10 months, extending a decline of about 40 per cent from its record high above US$126,000. That peak had been fuelled in part by expectations of a more crypto-friendly stance from the Trump administration. Other major tokens also weakened, with Ethereum down more...
Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker Xpeng Motors showcased its humanoid robot in front of hundreds of onlookers at a mall in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen over the weekend, but a backwards flop became headlines, reflecting the bumpy journey ahead for such machines. After completing a smooth catwalk to the centre of the audience on Saturday, Iron, the 178cm robot said to walk with humanlike grace, lost its balance and fell backwards when standing still on the stage, according to multiple...
Alibaba Group Holding has joined rivals including Tencent Holdings and Baidu in rolling out Spring Festival red-packet giveaways to drive mass-market adoption of its artificial intelligence apps, committing 3 billion yuan (US$432 million) to spur spending across its ecosystem as it seeks to extend its edge in foundational models to consumer-facing products. The Hangzhou-based e-commerce and AI giant said on Monday that its AI app Qwen would anchor a Spring Festival campaign across its flagship...
China’s frontier artificial intelligence labs are ending the lunar year on a high note, racing to release a series of new AI models in the last few weeks of the Year of the Snake as the country gears up to celebrate the start of the Year of the Horse. Beijing-based Zhipu AI and Shanghai-quartered MiniMax, which just made their stock exchange debuts in Hong Kong, would be the next to update their flagship AI systems with across-the-board enhancements, according to sources familiar with their...
Nearly 100 companies filed new listing applications in Hong Kong in January, marking a strong start to 2026 for initial public offering (IPO) activity. A total of 95 companies applied to list on Hong Kong’s main board, while one sought a place on the Growth Enterprise Market, which primarily served smaller and growth-stage firms, according to a report from Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) on Friday. The 96 applications were more than triple the 29 recorded a year earlier, and roughly...
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) needs to “work very hard” to meet growing demand from leading US chip designer Nvidia, which alone could require TSMC to more than double its capacity in the next decade, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said. Huang’s remarks followed a high-profile banquet on Saturday evening with executives of key supply chain partners in Taiwan, including TSMC chairman and CEO C C Wei and Foxconn chairman Young Liu, as the Nvidia founder sought to shore up supply...
Elon Musk wants to bring the production of its Optimus robot to the US amid electric carmaker Tesla’s plan to pivot towards manufacturing humanoids, smart machines that could one day serve as part of the workforce at American factories. That ambitious initiative, however, was expected to remain dependent on China’s vast and fast-developing robotics supply chain into the foreseeable future, even as the final assembly of Optimus would be established in the US, according to analysts and industry...
Ann Cao / South China Morning Post: Sources: Alibaba has delivered more than 100K units of the Zhenwu 810E, an ASIC for AI training and inference, surpassing those of its domestic rival Cambricon — The milestone underscores Alibaba's growing footprint in AI hardware, as Chinese firms accelerate efforts to build home-grown processors
Coco Feng / South China Morning Post: Filing: Chinese AI chip designer Cambricon reports a $316M net profit in 2025, its first profitable year; rivals Moore Threads and MetaX narrowed their losses — Domestic A-share companies in the sector are forecast to achieve substantial growth in their 2025 results, according to Donghai Securities
Chinese regulators have slapped a 26 million yuan (US$3.7 million) fine on a unit of Kuaishou Technology, operator of the country’s No 2 short video platform, over multiple violations and misconduct in its live-streaming e-commerce operations, signalling tighter oversight of this market segment. Chengdu Kuaigou Technology, a unit of Beijing-based Kuaishou, was found to have committed seven breaches including failure to disclose information in accordance with the law, charging unreasonable fees...
Wingtech Technology, the Chinese owner of chipmaker Nexperia, is expected to post a loss of between 9 billion yuan (US$1.3 billion) and 13.5 billion yuan in 2025, owing to the Dutch government’s takeover of the semiconductor firm, the Shanghai-listed company said in a statement on Friday. Wingtech said that its authority over the chipmaker continues to be “temporarily restricted” since the October 7 ruling of the Dutch Enterprise Chamber, a special division of the Amsterdam Court of Appeal,...
Enterprises across China’s semiconductor industry recorded hefty profit growth last year, according to their unaudited financial results, driven by the country’s artificial intelligence infrastructure buildout and Beijing’s push for tech self-reliance. Graphics processing unit (GPU) designer Cambricon Technologies on Friday reported a net profit of 2.2 billion yuan (US$316 million) in 2025, its first profitable year, on the back of “the continuous rise in computing power demand within the AI...
In the world’s biggest wholesale electronics marketplace in the bustling Huaqiangbei district of the southern Chinese metropolis of Shenzhen, memory is the new gold. On a Tuesday in January, a merchant surnamed Ye held up a list of prices that looked more appropriate for luxury goods than humble computer parts. A pair of 32-gigabyte, 6000-megahertz Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) memory sticks was priced at 6,878 yuan (US$990) – having shot up nearly fivefold since September. “In my over 10 years in...
Chinese fintech giant Ant Group has open-sourced its first artificial intelligence models for robotics, as it steps up efforts to build machine intelligence capable of handling complex real-world tasks. The move signals a deeper push by the Hangzhou-based Ant into embodied intelligence – AI systems designed to perceive, reason and act in physical environments rather than purely digital settings. The company is the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning...
ByteDance and Alibaba Group Holding are poised to ratchet up their artificial intelligence infrastructure initiatives, as the global AI arms race continues to intensify. The two companies’ latest moves lend weight to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s recent remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the world was witnessing the biggest infrastructure buildout in history and that trillions of dollars of infrastructure still had to be built. Beijing-based ByteDance, operator of TikTok...
Alibaba Group Holding has delivered more than 100,000 units of its most advanced artificial intelligence chip, the Zhenwu 810E, whose performance is said to be comparable to Nvidia’s H20, according to people familiar with the matter – a milestone that highlights the company’s growing role in China’s race to build domestic alternatives to US processors. The shipments, handled by Alibaba’s semiconductor arm T-Head, have already surpassed those of domestic rival Cambricon Technologies, the sources...
China has emerged as the brightest spot in Apple’s quarterly earnings, as the US tech giant achieved record iPhone revenue in the world’s largest smartphone market. Revenue in Apple’s Greater China region, which comprises mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, surged 38 per cent from a year earlier in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended December 27, the Cupertino-based company said on Friday. That growth, more than double the company’s overall 16 per cent quarterly revenue increase,...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] Hong Kong’s construction sector is at a watershed moment, industry leaders say, as AI and robotics begin to deliver measurable gains in productivity and site safety, a view shared at the Construction Industry Council’s Master Talk on harnessing AI for the sector. The Master Talk, held on January 22, brought together public clients, developers, contractors, consultants and tech firms to examine how AI and robotics are...
Morgan Stanley expects China’s humanoid robot sales to grow 133 per cent to 28,000 units this year, while noting that falling production costs will gradually make owning robots more accessible. The US investment bank revised its forecast from the 14,000 units previously on the back of the rapid growth of the industry in the world’s second largest economy. The cost of materials to produce robots in China, home to most of the industry’s supply chain, was set to drop 16 per cent this year, the bank...
China’s artificial intelligence hyperscalers have quickly added cloud support for Moltbot, formerly known as Clawdbot, an open-source AI agent that has exploded in popularity globally. Billed as the “AI that actually does things”, Moltbot’s ability to autonomously execute tasks without the user directing each action has caused waves in the global developer community, briefly lifting shares of US web infrastructure giant Cloudflare in pre-market trading on Tuesday before they later...
Alibaba Group Holding’s semiconductor design arm, T-Head, on Thursday unveiled details of its advanced artificial intelligence chip with capabilities said to be on par with Nvidia’s H20, days after the unit was reportedly being prepared for a potential spin-off and public listing. According to information on T-Head’s website, the Zhenwu 810E was a “fully self-developed” parallel processing unit (PPU), an application-specific integrated circuit designed for both AI training and inference. Alibaba...
The Taiwan government has cleared Nvidia to establish a NT$3.3 billion (US$105 million) headquarters on the island that produces most of the world’s advanced semiconductors, which the Silicon Valley chip designer will need to feed the red-hot global artificial intelligence sector. Nvidia would use the Taipei site for a “commercial office” building and the acquisition of land for a “comprehensive business park”, the island’s Ministry of Economic Affairs announced on Wednesday. The approval came a...
The financial head of Dutch chipmaking equipment giant ASML – following a year of double-digit sales growth for the company’s machines – said he expects the firm’s already declining sales to China to fall even further, as trade restrictions prevent shipments of the firm’s most advanced units to Chinese clients and demand for other models is likely to taper off after an earlier rush. China’s share of ASML’s global sales dropped by 8 percentage points in 2025, falling to 33 per cent from the 41...
The S&P 500 breached the 7,000-point mark for the first time on Wednesday, driven by unrelenting optimism over artificial intelligence and expectations of strong Big Tech earnings as well as monetary policy easing. The benchmark index’s ascent between successive 1,000-point additions has quickened in recent years, reflecting mounting investor confidence in the US economy and corporate America. It took about three years for the S&P 500 to rise to 5,000 points from 4,000, but only about nine...
Chips from Chinese semiconductor designer Hygon Information Technology were found unaffected by a recently disclosed vulnerability in products developed by its US tech licenser and former joint venture partner Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), according to analysts, which showed progress in China’s self-reliance drive. Hygon’s central processing units (CPUs), which were developed under a licence to use AMD’s X86-based Zen chip architecture, did not have the hardware security flaw that affected a...
Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs in the second round of mass lay-offs for the e-commerce company in three months. The tech giant has said it plans to use generative artificial intelligence to replace corporate workers. It has also been reducing a workforce that increased during the pandemic. Beth Galetti, a senior vice-president at Amazon, said in a blog post on Wednesday that the company has been “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy”. The company did...
Moonshot AI’s newest release, Kimi K2.5, has narrowed the gap between the US and China to the closest it has ever been in the development of artificial intelligence models, according to third-party evaluations. That feat by the Beijing-based start-up, founded in March 2023, has raised questions about the efficacy of US policies – most notably, export controls on advanced semiconductors – to constrain China’s AI development efforts, said Kyle Chan, a fellow of the John L Thornton China Centre at...
Beijing has begun approving imports of Nvidia’s H200 graphics processing units (GPUs), according to two sources familiar with the matter, ending regulatory uncertainty over the US tech giant’s second most powerful artificial intelligence chip. The first batch was expected to go to Big Tech companies, which were in urgent need of the GPU, a source said. However, access for state-backed companies, such as telecommunication network operators, was expected to remain under tight control, the source...
Beijing has begun approving imports of Nvidia’s H200 graphics processing units (GPUs), according to two sources familiar with the matter, ending regulatory uncertainty over the US tech giant’s second most powerful artificial intelligence chip. The first batch was expected to go to Big Tech companies, which were in urgent need of the GPU, a source said. However, access for state-backed companies, such as telecommunication network operators, was expected to remain under tight control, the source...
Education in China’s countryside should shift away from rote-based learning to focus on nurturing curiosity and creativity in the artificial intelligence era, Alibaba Group Holding founder Jack Ma said in a meeting with rural teachers on Monday. In remarks published by the Jack Ma Foundation on Tuesday, former English teacher Ma said the dawn of the AI era posed a challenge for rural education, but also presented an opportunity to “return to the fundamentals of education”. Alibaba owns the South...
Several Chinese cloud service providers are “evaluating price increases”, according to analysts, following recent moves by Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS), as the explosive growth of artificial intelligence drives demand. Google on Tuesday announced price rises of up to 100 per cent for certain services, effective May 1. For example, North American users of the CDN Interconnect, Direct Peering, and Carrier Peering services will pay US$0.08 per gigabyte, double the current rate. In Asia, the...
Some of the biggest names in esports will descend on Hong Kong next month for the finals of the League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK) Cup. Following on from the successful Blast Premier event at Cyberport last November, the LCK Cup represents another step up for gaming in the city. Kai Tak Arena will host the tournament, from February 28 to March 1, the first time the event has been held outside South Korea. Chow Kai-hong, chairman of the Hong Kong Esports Association, said they had received...
The Hong Kong Investment Corporation (HKIC) is eyeing investments in fintech, aerospace and artificial intelligence, tapping the city’s strengths and a wave of incoming talent and enterprises as geopolitical shifts create new opportunities, according to its CEO. The city’s wholly owned investment vehicle, which manages HK$62 billion (US$8 billion) in funds, would look at these new sectors in addition to its other focus areas, “playing to Hong Kong’s advantages in the context of the global...
China has emerged as the world’s second most competitive country for artificial intelligence in finance, ranking behind the US but well ahead of the rest of Asia, according to a global index. China scored 83.41 in the Global AI Competitiveness Index, trailing the US at 98.84 and ahead of the UK at 78.26, a report released on Wednesday by think tank Deep Knowledge Group showed. Switzerland ranked fourth, followed by Singapore, Germany, Saudi Arabia and India. The world’s second-largest economy...
Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek on Tuesday unveiled an upgraded version of its optical character recognition (OCR) model, incorporating an Alibaba Cloud-developed open-source system to boost performance. The new model, DeepSeek-OCR 2, replaced a key component of its original architecture with Alibaba Cloud’s lightweight Qwen2-0.5b model, according to a research paper released by the company. The update, which comes just over three months after DeepSeek launched the first...
Chinese chip designer Shanghai Iluvatar CoreX Semiconductor has unveiled a multi-year graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture road map, aiming to surpass Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin platform within two years, amid the country’s push for semiconductor self-reliance. The company said its Tianshu architecture had outperformed Nvidia’s Hopper platform last year, while a second architecture, Tianxuan, would be built to benchmark against the US firm’s Blackwell platform. A third, Tianji, was...
Mainland China could become one of the first markets in the world to approve a drug fully designed by artificial intelligence, as advances in AI and human genetics combine to create a “seismic shift” in drug development, according to executives of pharmaceutical giants. “We will see in 2026 that we move from AI-assisted discovery to fully AI-designed compounds, perhaps entering the pipeline,” said Marc Horn, president of Merck China, at the Asian Financial Forum on Tuesday in Hong Kong. “We...
Exports of chip-manufacturing equipment, electric vehicles (EVs) and other high-value goods from China’s southern Guangdong province rose to a record high last year of over 1 trillion yuan (US$140 billion), highlighting the country’s progress in its quest for technological self-sufficiency in an ongoing tech war with the US. The country’s leading manufacturing hub exported semiconductor equipment worth more than 800 billion yuan in 2025, an increase of nearly 20 per cent from a year earlier,...
Alibaba Group Holding and Moonshot AI have unveiled their latest flagship artificial intelligence models, narrowing the gap with US industry leaders OpenAI and Google DeepMind. The new models from two of China’s leading AI developers mark the first major Chinese model releases of this year, as industry observers continue to closely monitor the gap between the US and China in developing cutting-edge foundational models. Alibaba Cloud announced its biggest-ever model, Qwen3-Max-Thinking, on...
Baidu has merged two of its consumer app businesses into a new artificial intelligence-focused unit, stepping up its push into China’s fast-evolving and fiercely contested market for consumer AI applications. The company combined its online document-sharing business Wenku and consumer-oriented cloud storage operation Wangpan to form the Personal Super Intelligence Business Group (PSIG), according to a source familiar with the matter. The move marks one of Baidu’s largest reorganisations in the...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] As enthusiasm for generative artificial intelligence sweeps across boardrooms, a growing number of executives are confronting a harder question: how to turn early experimentation into sustained business value. Experience advising large organisations suggests that success rarely comes from isolated pilots or ad hoc deployments. Instead, companies that extract meaningful returns tend to build a self-reinforcing cycle...