The CEO of Nvidia, which faces tight restrictions on selling its chips to China amid the Sino-US battle over trade and technology, said he was disappointed about the situation. Jensen Huang said he expected to discuss the issue with US President Donald Trump at a state banquet hosted by the British government that they would be attending on Wednesday night. Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, is restricted from exporting to China its most advanced chips,...
Alibaba Group Holding’s semiconductor design unit, T-Head, has developed an artificial intelligence chip with capabilities that are on par with Nvidia’s H20 graphics processing unit (GPU), according to a report by state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV). The report, which aired on Tuesday, showed T-Head’s PPU, an application-specific integrated circuit, being compared with Nvidia’s H20 and A800 GPUs in a performance benchmark during Premier Li Qiang’s visit to a data centre operated by...
China’s two largest mobile payment services, Ant Group’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings’ Weixin Pay, have adopted a new cross-border payment system designed to facilitate cashless transactions made by foreigners in the country. Alipay, along with Ant Group’s overseas spin-off Ant International, and Weixin Pay said in separate statements on Wednesday that they were expanding support for foreign e-wallets through China’s Cross-border Interconnection Payment Gateway scheme. Ant is affiliated with...
Alibaba Group Holding has jumped into the burgeoning robotaxi market – which is a promising and profitable area for artificial intelligence applications – by investing in Hello, a ride-hailing business backed by its fintech affiliate Ant Group. Hello said on Wednesday that it had received “a strategic investment” from Alibaba to cooperate in areas such as algorithm platforms and smart driving large language models with the goal of achieving “commercialisation” and “scaled operations” of robotaxi...
Huawei Technologies has expressed optimism over the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) over the next decade, while anticipating that global computing capacity will increase a staggering 100,000-fold by 2035. “AGI will be the largest driver of transformation,” the Shenzhen-based company said in a forecast report published on Tuesday. “Integrating artificial intelligence with the physical world is essential to achieving AGI, which could lead to a technological singularity.” The...
ByteDance-owned Doubao remains the most popular artificial intelligence app in mainland China, with 157 million monthly active users (MAUs) in August, as rival DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot continued to lose market share. Launched by TikTok and Douyin owner ByteDance in August 2023, Doubao has recorded consistent growth so far this year, with a 6.6 per cent increase in the number of users from July, according to data compiled by market research firm QuestMobile. By contrast, second-ranked...
The way people eat, make nutritional decisions and monitor health is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation in Asia. Artificial intelligence (AI), wearables and online applications are reshaping the food landscape, embedding personalised nutrition services into daily life. From WeChat’s nutrition-tracking mini-programmes to Grab’s food delivery algorithms helping users discover healthier options, digital platforms are becoming sophisticated intelligent systems that help advance...
My life’s mission has been to create safe, beneficial AI that will make the world a better place. But recently, I’ve been increasingly concerned about people starting to believe so strongly in AIs as conscious entities that they will advocate for “AI rights” and even citizenship. This development would represent a dangerous turn for the technology. It must be avoided. We must build artificial intelligence for people, not to be people. In this context, debates about whether AI truly can be...
Chery Automobile, China’s second-largest carmaker by volume, aims to raise as much as HK$9.14 billion (US$1.2 billion) through a Hong Kong stock offering, joining a wave of mainland companies tapping into strong investor sentiment in the electric vehicle (EV) sector. China’s second-biggest carmaker said it would offer 297.4 million shares priced between HK$27.75 and HK$30.75, with the final offer price to be determined on September 23, according to a filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange on...
Shares of chipmakers rose on Tuesday as the group posted its longest winning streak in almost eight years. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index rose 0.3 per cent in its ninth straight positive session, its longest such streak since 2017. The gauge has jumped 8.7 per cent over the period and is now up 22 per cent this year, beating the Nasdaq 100 Index’s almost 16 per cent gain. Among notable movers, ON Semiconductor jumped 3 per cent, Intel rose 2 per cent and Applied Materials...
US lawmakers are asking Futurewei, a subsidiary of the blacklisted Chinese firm Huawei Technologies, to explain why it shared buildings in Silicon Valley with Nvidia, thrusting the US chipmaker into the crossfire of an investigation into possible Chinese espionage. A letter penned by Republican Chairman John Moolenaar and Democratic Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi of the House Select Committee on China shows a decadelong history of a shared address for Futurewei Technologies at Nvidia’s...
Hesai Group, the world’s largest maker of automotive lidar sensors, plans to double down on production capacity amid a bullish global outlook for intelligent cars after raising HK$4.2 billion (US$531 million) in a Hong Kong share offering. Chief financial officer Andrew Fan said after the Shanghai-based company’s trading debut on Tuesday that the quality and affordability of Hesai’s light detection and ranging sensors – which employ laser beams to measure distances to objects – would effectively...
Shuimu BioSciences, a Chinese start-up specialising in advanced imaging devices for viruses and smaller biomolecules, is aiming for an initial public offering in 2027 after selling its first self-developed product this year, according to CEO Allen Guo Chunlong. The company focuses on cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM), a technique that involves firing beams of electrons at flash-frozen specimens to capture thousands of images. The images are then used to reconstruct precise three-dimensional...
In the global race for artificial intelligence (AI), nations rightly chase cutting-edge technologies, big data and data centres heavy with graphics processing units (GPUs). But thought leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and institutions from the Federation of American Scientists to China’s Ministry of Education are urging investment in educator training and AI literacy for all citizens. They argue for a more human-centred AI strategy. Having taught AI and data analytics in China, I have...
Alibaba Group Holding is looking to ramp up its cross-border e-commerce strategy by getting merchants on its premium Tmall shopping site to sell to consumers in Southeast Asia through subsidiary Lazada. “This is the first time that Tmall has established a direct connection to Lazada’s platform to facilitate the seamless onboarding of sellers,” a representative from Singapore-based Lazada said on Tuesday, adding that this initiative started last month. Alibaba owns the Post. The cross-border...
Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek has conducted internal evaluations on the “frontier risks” of its AI models, according to a person familiar with the matter. The development, not previously reported, comes as Beijing seeks to promote awareness of such risks within China’s AI industry. Frontier risks refer to AI systems that pose potentially significant threats to public safety and social stability. The Hangzhou-based company, which has been China’s poster child for AI...
Nvidia’s RTX6000D, its newest artificial intelligence chip tailored for the Chinese market, has seen only lukewarm demand with some major tech firms opting not to place orders, two people with knowledge of procurement discussions said. The RTX6000D, designed mainly for AI inference tasks, is seen as expensive for what it does, according to the two people. They added that testing of samples showed its performance lags the RTX5090 – a chip banned by the US government for use in mainland China, but...
Tencent Holdings, which runs the world’s largest video gaming business by revenue and China’s biggest social media platform WeChat, has become the latest mainland technology company to push the adoption of locally designed artificial intelligence (AI) chips, as the country cuts the use of imported semiconductors such as those from Nvidia. The Shenzhen-based tech conglomerate’s cloud computing unit, Tencent Cloud, said it was supporting “mainstream domestic chips” in its AI computing...
A Chinese biotech firm that soared more than 4,500 per cent in the three months since its Hong Kong debut, has stoked fears of a speculative bubble in China healthcare stocks. Shares of TransThera Sciences soared as much as 64 per cent to HK$679.50 in Hong Kong trading on Tuesday, after pricing at just HK$13.15 in late June – a more than 50-fold gain that has made it the top performer on the Hang Seng Healthcare Index this year. TransThera noted the “unusual movements” in its share price in an...
Shanghai Henlius Biotech is in talks with multinational pharmaceutical firms including Johnson & Johnson and Roche Holding about selling them the rights to an experimental cancer drug, people familiar with the matter said. An agreement could fetch the subsidiary of Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical at least several hundred million dollars up front and then more in milestone payments down the road based on the drug’s performance, the people said. They asked not to be identified because the...
Google’s recently announced blockchain for financial institutions is the latest move in the battle to dominate the infrastructure for processing global transactions in bitcoin, digitised currency, stablecoins and tokenised assets. While government leaders are obsessed with semiconductors, the deeper and more critical issue could be the type of blockchain that will prevail in capital markets. The winner will shape whether financial risks shrink through efficiency and transparency or expand. With...
Shares of Hesai Group, the world’s largest supplier of lidar sensors, rose in their Hong Kong debut on Tuesday as investors tapped into the offering amid a slew of blockbuster deals in the city’s listing pipeline. Trading under the code 2525, Hesai’s shares opened at HK$229.20, a premium of 7.7 per cent to the offer price of HK$212.80 per share. The stock climbed as high as HK$244 before closing at HK$234. The company sold 19.55 million shares, including 2.55 million shares through the full...
American tech giants such as OpenAI and Nvidia are trying to “lock in” developers to their closed-source artificial intelligence ecosystems by open-sourcing tools in other layers of the tech stack, according to a report from Chinese fintech company Ant Group. While most leading US large language models are closed-source, Chinese players from Alibaba Cloud to TikTok-owner ByteDance have instead opted to “open-source” their models, meaning that developers can download and build on top of them. A...
Shares of China’s domestic legacy chipmakers, including SG Micro and 3Peak, surged on Monday after Beijing’s weekend announcement of an anti-dumping investigation into imported US semiconductors. The government’s probe into imported “analogue integrated-circuit (IC) chips” – widely used in home appliances, machinery and electric vehicles – marked the first-ever anti-dumping probe into imported IC products as the country makes steady progress in developing domestic alternatives for these...
Chinese tech giant Xiaomi will skip directly to the Xiaomi 17 smartphone series after last year’s Xiaomi 15 line-up in a bold move to compete against Apple, which unveiled the iPhone 17 family last week. “The Xiaomi 17 series represents a generational leap in product capability,” said Lei Jun, the founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, in a social media post on Monday. The new devices were “fully benchmarked against the iPhone and ready for head-to-head competition!” he added. Xiaomi has moved up...
Chinese chipmaker Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics Group, which was blacklisted by the US government over the weekend, said its supply chain was resilient and that China was set to play a bigger role in tech innovation. The company said in a statement issued on Saturday that it had always operated in a “lawful and compliant manner” and adhered to international rules. Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics said it would remain “independent and controllable”, and continue to engage in “open collaboration”...
China’s antitrust regulator said on Monday it found Nvidia in violation of the country’s anti-monopoly law and would proceed with further investigation, which could lead to punitive actions against the American chipmaker amid escalating technology rivalry with the US. The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said in a one-line statement that Nvidia violated both antitrust laws and the Chinese government’s terms of approval for the company’s acquisition of Israeli interconnect...
Xpeng, part owned by Volkswagen Group, has begun production in Europe in partnership with a contract manufacturer in Austria, as mainland Chinese electric vehicle (EV) makers make inroads into the continent and circumvent punitive tariffs. The Guangzhou-based carmaker said on Monday that it had started assembling the G6 and G9 SUVs at Magna Steyr’s plant in Graz. Xpeng did not elaborate on its planned output, but added that cooperation with its partner would deepen over time. “[The roll-out]...
The release of two electric vehicle (EV) battery packs targeted specifically at the European market has brightened the earnings outlook for Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL) whose market share jumped in China last month. Fujian-based CATL, the world’s largest EV battery producer, delivered 26.45 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of batteries in August, up 26 per cent from the previous year. Its share of the domestic market hit 42.4 per cent for the month, up from 41.4 per cent in July, according to the...
The leaders of OpenAI and Nvidia plan to pledge support for billions of dollars in UK data centre investments when they head to the country next week at the same time as President Donald Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The two companies are teaming up with London-based data centre business Nscale Global Holdings on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang are part of...
Chinese technology and mobile gaming giant Tencent Holdings has appointed banks for its first bond offering in four years. The company is proposing to sell offshore-yuan denominated notes with five-year, 10-year and 30-year tenors as early as Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the matter. It said Bank of China and JPMorgan Chase would be the joint global coordinators, with Bank of Communications and Morgan Stanley serving as the joint bookrunners for the deal, the person added. If...
China’s legacy chip companies are set to gain from the latest escalation in the US-China tech war, as Beijing’s latest anti-dumping investigation targets analogue chipmakers from the US. The Ministry of Commerce said on Saturday the import volume of US mature mode integrated circuit (IC) chips subject to the investigation increased 37 per cent from 2022 to 2024, but the import price decreased 52 per cent in the same period, which had “lowered and suppressed the sales prices of domestic...
Cyberport may add some graphics processing units (GPUs) made in China to its Artificial Intelligence Supercomputing Centre in Hong Kong, as the government-run incubator seeks to reduce its reliance on Nvidia chips amid worsening China-US relations, its chief executive said. Cyberport has bought four GPUs made by four different mainland Chinese chipmakers and has been testing them at its AI lab to gauge which ones to adopt in the expanding facilities, Rocky Cheng Chung-ngam said in an interview...
Bullish sentiment towards stocks is rampant in the US, as one Wall Street strategist after another raises their target for an S&P 500 Index that is repeatedly setting records. Yet as optimism about further gains has solidified into something resembling a consensus, even the most bullish are clear-eyed about a growing list of issues that could potentially stop the party. With valuations at among the richest levels of this century, the most commonly cited risks for a hard market landing include...
A technical innovation has allowed Alibaba Group Holding, one of the leading players in China’s artificial intelligence boom, to develop a new generation of foundation models that match the strong performance of larger predecessors while being significantly smaller and more cost efficient. Alibaba Cloud, the AI and cloud computing division of Alibaba, unveiled on Friday a new generation of large language models that it said heralded “the future of efficient LLMs”. The new models are nearly 13...
Pre-order sales of Apple’s new iPhone 17 series have got off to a robust start in China, shattering previous records despite delays in the shipment of the iPhone Air. In the first minute after pre-orders began at 8pm Friday local time, sales on JD.com – one of China’s largest online shopping platforms – surpassed the first-day pre-order volume of last year’s iPhone 16 series, according to the e-commerce operator. The standard iPhone 17 with 256GB of storage emerged as the most popular variant,...
Since April, mainland Chinese consumers have been spoiled for choice, as instant commerce competition brought dazzling promotional subsidies and speedy deliveries right to their doorsteps. Instant commerce – a turbocharged combination of online shopping and swift dispatch – had already made a typical lunchbox order cost around US$1 or US$2, which covered the food and the delivery fee. On-demand delivery giant Meituan’s “Grouping for Good Meals” campaign, for example, offered a four-dish set meal...
Vincent Chow / South China Morning Post: Beijing-based AIsphere, the startup behind the AI video generator PixVerse, raised a $60M Series B led by Alibaba, and says PixVerse has 100M+ users globally — AIsphere's PixVerse has over 100 million users globally, more than double the number it had at the start of the year
Ant Group has distanced itself from the business of issuing cryptocurrencies, pledging to focus on tokenisation to support the “real economy”, as the Chinese fintech giant strives to maintain a delicate balance between technological advancement and regulatory compliance. “Ant Group will not issue cryptocurrencies, nor participate in any form of the hype,” CEO Cyril Han Xinyi said during the Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai on Thursday. “Ant is focused on building technological...
One of China’s biggest sportswear makers, 361 Degrees International, said it will adopt stablecoin payment and settlement for its overseas operations, becoming one of the first mainland retailers to make such a move as it seeks overseas expansion. The Xiamen-based company said in a Hong Kong stock exchange filing on Thursday that it planned to use stablecoins in transactions outside mainland China, covering offline stores, e-commerce sales, supply chain services and digital ecosystem...
Huawei Technologies has reshuffled the leadership of its in-house chip design unit, HiSilicon, at a time when China’s semiconductor industry is consolidating amid the escalating US-China tech war. The Shenzhen-based Huawei unit has promoted Jeffery Gao, head of its Shanghai division, to the position of HiSilicon chairman. He replaced Eric Xu, deputy chairman of the overall Huawei group, who had also been leading the chip unit since 2008, according to the latest information from Chinese corporate...
Apple is likely to delay Chinese shipments of its new iPhone Air, the thinnest model ever, as the company works with mainland authorities to resolve regulatory issues related to the use of an embedded SIM. As of Friday morning, Apple had revised iPhone Air ordering details for the mainland, replacing the original launch schedule with “release information to be updated later”. Previously, the company stated that pre-orders would start at 8pm Friday local time, while deliveries would begin on...
Coco Feng / South China Morning Post: Apple delays iPhone Air preorders in China, likely over eSIM regulatory issues, and replaces the launch schedule with “release information to be updated later” — Apple says all three state-owned telecoms network operators would provide eSIM support ‘subject to regulatory approval’
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OpenAI said it was closer to converting into a more traditional for-profit company – nearing the resolution of painful negotiations with top shareholder Microsoft and outlining terms of at least US$100 billion in equity for its non-profit arm. Planned changes will give the existing OpenAI non-profit control over a new public benefit corporation, Chairman Bret Taylor said in a statement Thursday. And it would provide the non-profit with an equity stake that would make it “one of the most...
Alibaba Group Holding on Friday open-sourced its latest artificial intelligence model, built on the new Qwen3-Next architecture, which is 10 times more powerful but costs only a 10th to build compared to its predecessor. The company’s Qwen team said it adopted an array of architectural innovations aimed at maximising performance while minimising computational costs, according to a note published on the developer platform GitHub. The model is developed by Alibaba Cloud, the AI and cloud computing...
More than 40 million Amap users logged on to test its artificial intelligence-powered ranking service, as Alibaba Group Holding’s answer to Google Maps started ranking mainland destinations and providing recommendations for 1.6 million establishments. Amap Street Stars – which uses AI algorithms to rank destinations including restaurants, hotels and tourist attractions – recorded that many users on its launch on Wednesday, as the mapping app positioned itself as a gateway for lifestyle services,...
Ant Group unveiled its first humanoid robot at a trade show in Shanghai on Thursday, heralding the Chinese fintech company’s entry into the increasingly competitive field of embodied artificial intelligence to take on rivals like Unitree Robotics. The wheeled, two-armed humanoid, named R1, was developed by Ant’s robotics unit Ant Lingbo Technology, also known as Robbyant. At the company’s booth at the Inclusion Conference on the Bund on Thursday, the second day of the four-day event, one R1...
DNA sequencers from Chinese firm MGI Tech can rival those from global market leader Illumina in spite of US sanctions, according to Yin Ye, CEO of BGI Group, former parent of the Shenzhen-based biotech company. MGI’s sequencers offer the best “comprehensive value” in terms of time, quality and cost, Yin said in an interview on the sidelines of the BioHK 2025 conference on Thursday. Yin, 46, pointed out that MGI’s latest product, the DNBSEQ-T7+, is “pushing physics and chemistry to the limit”, as...
Chinese drug makers put on a brave face in the wake of a report that said the Trump administration was considering new restrictions on China-developed medicines, citing the country’s supply chain and cost advantages, according to executives at a forum in Hong Kong on Thursday. While shares of Hong Kong-listed Chinese drug makers plunged after Thursday’s New York Times report that the US government was drafting an executive order to curb licensing deals with China-based firms, pharmaceutical...