In the months leading up to President Xi Jinping’s planned September visit to Washington for a summit with US President Donald Trump, a series of smaller trade and technology rifts has emerged between the world’s two largest economies. From tensions over Chinese artificial intelligence models and new US restrictions on advanced robotics, to optical modules and an expanded forced labour blacklist, this piece breaks down the latest developments shaping US-China economic ties. 1. AI models under...
Shares of China’s leading optical-module makers clawed back early losses on Wednesday after analysts downplayed the impact of proposed US restrictions that could block the firms from future American AI data centres. They noted that the rules would likely leave current supply chains intact and face significant hurdles because of America’s heavy reliance on Chinese manufacturing. Zhongji Innolight ended the day down 7.3 per cent and 6.7 per cent in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, respectively, while...
Rising cost efficiency and rapidly advancing capabilities from players like DeepSeek and MiniMax have prompted Goldman Sachs to raise its run-rate revenue forecast for China’s artificial intelligence model market by 30 per cent to US$13 billion. In a research note published on Monday, the US investment bank boosted its year-end annualised recurring revenue (ARR) projection for mainland Chinese AI models from US$10 billion, citing aggressive price cuts, technical breakthroughs and accelerating...
Shares in Zhongji Innolight dived as much as 16 per cent on Wednesday after a report the United States intends to ban Chinese-made optical transceivers from use in data centres being used to power the race to develop artificial intelligence (AI). The plan by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to halt imports of new models of optical transceivers – which convert data into light pulses and back again – is reportedly aimed at preventing Chinese firms stealing data, installing malware or...
Chinese unicorn Moonshot AI has started and is expected to close its latest financing round by the end of this month, as it dismantles its offshore structure to pave the way for a potential Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) as early as the end of the year, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The company was expected to raise capital at a valuation of up to US$50 billion in this latest round, one of the sources said. The South China Morning Post, citing sources, reported last...
Chinese start-up X Square Robot has filed confidentially for an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong, according to two sources familiar with the matter, joining a growing wave of domestic robot makers flocking to capital markets, despite new US trade restrictions. The Shenzhen-based firm has tapped Huatai Securities and Morgan Stanley as sponsors for the prospective float, one of the sources said. Besides X Square, AgiBot and Galbot have also filed confidentially for Hong Kong IPOs, the...
Tencent Holdings is ramping up its overseas push for its flagship Hy3 artificial intelligence model, joining a wave of Chinese technology firms taking aim at the world’s leading players. On Wednesday, the Shenzhen-based technology giant rolled out Hy3 to global developers, enterprises and users through its workplace agentic tool WorkBuddy, creation studio Tencent Design Miora and model platform TokenHub. According to Tencent, Hy3 would be available free of charge worldwide on WorkBuddy until...
When Liao Heng joined Huawei Technologies’ chip-design unit in 2016, he was sceptical about whether China could ever build world-class semiconductors. A former child prodigy who entered Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University in 1987 at age 14 before moving to Princeton University for postdoctoral research, Liao had spent over a decade in the United States watching what he described as a “long sunset” for American chip start-ups. Working abroad, he noted, often bred a “blind arrogance” that...
The global AI race is becoming a contest over the international order. In June, the US convened the second summit under the 24-economy Pax Silica around secure supply chains, AI infrastructure and trusted technology partnerships. In July, all 193 UN member states met in Geneva for the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Days later, 29 countries signed the agreement establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) in Shanghai. Together, these developments...
Chinese artificial intelligence company MiniMax has open-sourced its new H3 video model but imposed licensing conditions on users in major overseas markets including the US and European Union, underscoring the copyright challenges in generative video AI. After the Shanghai-based company released the model’s weights to developers on Monday, users found that the licence restricted free access in the US, EU, UK and South Korea. The weights – the underlying parameters that encode its intelligence –...
A Chinese physical AI start-up’s brief claim to global dominance in robotics has run into controversy, underscoring the intense US-China competition to develop next-generation artificial intelligence and the challenges of evaluating autonomous systems. In June, Spirit AI, a Hangzhou, Zhejiang province-based firm founded in 2024, briefly overtook United States tech giant Nvidia to take the top spot on RoboArena – a global benchmark for physical AI – with its new Spirit v1.6 model, launched at the...
SpaceX’s first earnings report since its listing, together with the coming supply of a large chunk of shares available for public trading, will test the strength of the artificial intelligence trade’s recovery, which has driven the S&P 500 within striking distance of its record high and helped Hong Kong equities outperform. The first set of results from SpaceX as a publicly traded company will be under close scrutiny, with Elon Musk’s commercial aerospace unit viewed as a gauge of investors’...
Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment China (AMEC), the country’s top chip-tool maker, says its preliminary profit will nearly quadruple in the first half of the year as robust demand for home-grown semiconductors continues amid US sanctions. Based on unaudited figures, the company said its income between January and June was at least 2.7 billion yuan (US$400 million), representing a year-on-year growth of 282 per cent, according to a filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Monday. The upper...
Senior Chinese official Cai Qi welcomed China’s scientific and technological elite at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, a sign that China’s leaders have begun their secretive annual summer retreat. The leaders’ gathering at the resort in Hebei province, east of Beijing, presages the party’s fifth plenum in October, the last before a leadership reshuffle next year. Cai, who ranks fifth in the Communist Party hierarchy and is often referred to as President Xi Jinping’s “chief of staff”, “extended...
Doctoral researcher Hu Qi still has about two years left in his programme at the University of Hong Kong, but headhunters are already reaching out to pitch specific jobs and ask when he will graduate. Hu, who specialises in artificial intelligence agent security, is currently interning at a Chinese tech giant where his team leaders regularly ask about his post-graduation plans, urging him to sign on full-time the moment he finishes his degree. His experience reflects a growing sense of urgency...
Robbyant, the embodied artificial intelligence division of Ant Group, has begun seeking external funding, becoming the fourth unit of the fintech giant to step up capital-raising efforts. The unit said it was in talks with investors on Monday. As Ant Group’s “core initiative in embodied intelligence”, a Robbyant spokesperson said it would remain focused on developing a general-purpose “robot brain”, investing in technologies designed specifically for embodied AI and accelerating commercial...
Wuxi AppTec, Asia’s largest provider of contract pharmaceutical research, posted net income that smashed market expectations in the first half of the year amid strong demand tied to weight-loss and diabetes drugs, as well as gains in its US business. Interim net profit attributable to the owners of the Shanghai-based drug contractor advanced 33.7 per cent to 11.08 billion yuan (US$1.64 billion) from a year earlier, surpassing a Bloomberg mean consensus estimate – drawn from a pool of 25 analysts...
WuXi AppTec, Asia’s largest provider of contract pharmaceutical research, posted net income that smashed market expectations in the first half of the year amid strong demand tied to weight-loss and diabetes drugs, as well as gains in its US business. Interim net profit attributable to the owners of the Shanghai-based drug contractor advanced 33.7 per cent to 11.08 billion yuan (US$1.64 billion) from a year earlier, surpassing a Bloomberg mean consensus estimate – drawn from a pool of 25 analysts...
China has revised regulations on the protection of chip design, a critical move to push for tech self-sufficiency amid US export controls. Premier Li Qiang signed a State Council decree to promulgate the revised rules on the protection of layout designs of integrated circuits, Xinhua reported on Monday. The new rules will take effect on October 15. The revision clarified financial penalties for infringement as well as licensing, transfer and co-ownership rights, aiming to accelerate the...
Chinese AI company DeepSeek is inviting open-source developers to test its upcoming “harness” – software designed to turn large language models (LLMs) into AI agents – accelerating a push into agentic tech as DeepSeek’s latest V4 Flash model sends another cost-efficiency shock wave through Silicon Valley. The Hangzhou-based firm was looking for open-source project developers to join beta testing for DeepSeek Harness, according to a social media post on Saturday by Cui Tianyi, who leads the...
Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed healthcare for hundreds of millions of people in China. AI-powered apps help them manage their health and seek care, while others help doctors better diagnose and treat their patients. AI analysis of routine scans detects cancers and other conditions physicians might have missed. Personalised cancer vaccines built on AI analysis will soon begin rolling off production lines in China. The country’s leading tech companies have poured resources into...
Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com has launched a smart helmet for food couriers with features enabled by artificial intelligence technology, following similar roll-outs by rivals Alibaba Group Holding and Meituan as they seek to improve rider safety and boost delivery efficiency. The helmet integrates an AI-driven voice assistant with a camera that can “see” the surrounding environment, JD.com’s food delivery unit announced on Monday. The company said the device was designed to minimise...
Alibaba Group Holding has made its next-generation flagship artificial intelligence model Qwen3.8-Max widely accessible to global users ahead of an open-weights release next week. The move marks Alibaba’s return to open-sourcing its top-tier AI models after keeping several recent flagship releases proprietary earlier this year. It also signals the firm’s entry into a recent round of powerful releases by Chinese developers aggressively narrowing the gap with leading US labs. The massive...
A potential US ban on Chinese open-weight artificial intelligence (AI) models could cost American businesses up to US$12 billion per year, according to calculations by a US-based academic, as technology firms increasingly turn to cost-efficient Chinese solutions. While the exact economic toll of a ban remains difficult to quantify, usage data from New York-based OpenRouter – a large language model (LLM) aggregator – offers a glimpse into the potential fallout, said Daniel Yue, an assistant...
When 39-year-old Beijing investor Song shelled out 159,800 yuan (US$23,680) for a companion robot, he knew it would not be cooking meals or scrubbing floors. For him, becoming one of China’s first owners of a consumer humanoid was more about embracing the cutting edge. “The happiest part is often the waiting,” Song said of his decision to buy the female version of the U1 Pro, made by Shenzhen-based UBTech Robotics. For years, humanoid robots have been confined to factory floors and structured...
Inside the exhibition hall of a Shanghai-based artificial intelligence research institute, an ink-wash map covered an entire wall, immediately drawing your attention. It was a cartography of AI: chipmakers were rendered as mountains on islands and algorithms as jagged mountain ranges, while questions of privacy, fairness and machine consciousness drifted at the edges like uncharted islands. Foreign guests and I leaned in, tracing the brushstrokes. “Why is Huawei’s chip placed right at the...
Chinese tech investors are hearing warning bells after volatility in US tech stocks forced a fast-rising Wall Street hedge fund to clear its stock portfolio at a steep discount within a few days. “Don’t use leverage! Don’t use leverage! Don’t use leverage!” Shanghai-based public-markets analyst Harry Shen repeated to the South China Morning Post in an interview on Friday. Another warning came from Shanghai-based mainland Chinese stock market veteran Michael Zhang: “Don’t trade with borrowed...
In a bid to defend its market share against rapidly advancing, lower-cost Chinese rivals, US artificial intelligence firm OpenAI has launched an aggressive price war, slashing prices for its latest GPT-5.6 model line-up by up to 80 per cent. In a post on social media platform X on Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced an 80 per cent drop in developer pricing for its lightweight GPT-5.6 Luna model, bringing application programming interface (API) costs down to US$0.20 per million input tokens...
Chinese AI firm MiniMax has launched H3, its newest multimodal video generation model, pledging to break closed-source “dominance” through open weights and competitive pricing – as rival ByteDance rolls out its latest Seedance 2.5 model. H3 was currently the world’s most powerful AI model in video editing, according to benchmark platform Artificial Analysis. However, it trailed Google’s Gemini Omni Flash in text-to-video tasks, and ranked behind both ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 and Gemini Omni...
RedNote, the Chinese lifestyle social media platform also known as Xiaohongshu domestically, is looking to build out a large data centre facility in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, according to a source, in a move that comes amid China’s massive artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure push. Shanghai-based RedNote is planning the 600-megawatt project, either in Ulanqab proper, which is known for its wind and renewable energy projects, or west of the city, with a budget of around 15...
Apple is taking its first concrete steps to roll out initial artificial intelligence (AI) features in China, but CEO Tim Cook warned that a full integration of a revamped Siri AI there would take longer. Mainland Chinese consumers would first get a targeted suite of original Apple Intelligence capabilities, including the Clean Up photo-editing tool, which allows users to erase unwanted objects in photos, according to Cook. “We are working now through the roll-out of those, and there will be more...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] When the SEED Foundation began reviewing applications for IdeaPOP! 2026, a pattern emerged almost immediately. Across more than a hundred submissions from Hong Kong secondary school students, artificial intelligence featured in nearly every proposal. That observation raised a more important question than whether students knew how to use AI. Were they learning how to apply it with judgment — and, more importantly, how to...
Unitree Robotics will launch its initial public offering (IPO) in Shanghai next week, the firm announced late on Thursday, as China’s robotics start-ups race to go public amid an intense rivalry with their counterparts in the United States. The Hangzhou-based company plans to sell 40.45 million shares, or 10 per cent of its enlarged share capital. It is another closely watched debut on Shanghai’s Star Market, following the recent listing of ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), whose market...
American materials scientist Elsa Reichmanis, whose pioneering work helped lay part of the foundation for modern semiconductor manufacturing, said scientific collaboration should transcend rivalry after receiving one of China’s highest honours for foreign experts, describing science as “a universal language” that benefits all of society. Reichmanis, a professor of chemical engineering in Lehigh University’s department of chemical and biomolecular engineering and the director of its Institute for...
The fallout from Washington’s fresh import ban on foreign robots appears poised to disrupt the American living room, threatening to lock out market-dominating Chinese smart vacuums. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) added foreign-produced “advanced robotic devices” to its so-called Covered List on Tuesday, blocking new models from obtaining the equipment authorisation required for US import and sale. While initial reports largely focused on humanoids and quadrupeds – with the FCC...
ByteDance has integrated its enterprise collaboration unit into other teams, a move that sharpens its focus on using artificial intelligence to serve corporate clients as annualised AI revenue of US$4 billion pushes it to the front of the pack in China, according to sources. The Beijing-based company decided to integrate the product team of office tool Lark, known as Feishu domestically, into the product team in charge of the Doubao AI chatbot, according to an internal memo seen by the South...
The three independent spin-offs of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group are accelerating their capital-raising efforts, forging distinct financial paths after gaining operational autonomy in 2024. Ant Digital Technologies is preparing a financing round ahead of its initial public offering, according to Chinese financial news outlet STAR Market Daily, marking the latest strategic move from one of the units that it spun off. Details regarding the round’s valuation, target size, timeline or planned...
Chinese motorcycle exports hit a record in the first half of the year as domestic manufacturers, armed with their own technology gains, targeted upmarket segments long dominated by Honda, Yamaha and BMW. Exports reached 26.2 million units worth US$11.28 billion, rising 23.2 per cent in volume and 26.3 per cent in value year on year, according to Chinese customs data. Shipments to the US climbed 40 per cent to more than 3.9 million motorcycles, valued at US$1.13 billion. Unlike Chinese electric...
Chinese stocks trading overseas may emerge as a shelter for global investors, as confusion over the Federal Reserve’s monetary path drives diversification away from US equities and bonds amid a stumbling artificial intelligence trade. The Nasdaq Golden Dragon China Index of the biggest Chinese companies listed in the US has bucked a broader sell-off since the Fed’s July rate-decision meeting, rising 1.7 per cent. The Nasdaq-100 slumped 2.1 per cent and longer-dated Treasuries also fell during...
As US tech giants face growing market scrutiny over their swelling artificial intelligence budgets, China’s top technology firms are confronting a similar reckoning: proving that billions of dollars spent on AI infrastructure will yield sustainable profits. Here is a run down on how Chinese tech giants are navigating the AI monetisation challenge. Why are global investors nervous about ‘big tech’ AI spending? Global market anxiety intensified after Facebook owner Meta Platforms saw its...
A majority of surveyed global asset management firms plan to raise their artificial intelligence budgets by at least 50 per cent within the next year as the technology transforms the finance industry, a recent study showed. The study, released Tuesday by US fintech firm Clearwater Analytics, indicated the adoption of AI will have a major impact on labour-intensive operations. Of the fund managers polled, 62 per cent said they expected transformative change in data generation and...
At a video production base in Shenzhen, creators are generating so-called comic dramas using artificial intelligence, compressing months of production down to a matter of weeks. The Moli OPC AI Comic Drama Base, located in the northeastern part of the city, brings together directors, producers and distributors under one roof to capitalise on an emerging content genre: using AI to turn a short comic book or video into a microdrama. China’s AI short-drama market was projected by market...
Hwaseong, South Korea, past midnight. An engineer watches a defect pattern surface on her screen – the kind that, caught now, saves a week of wafers. She is locked in, fully absorbed, the way engineers get when a breakthrough is close. But she has to go home. The law says so. Yet something is disrupting the clock she races against. Artificial intelligence is quietly rewriting what her hours are worth. On June 29, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung stood alongside the leaders of Samsung...
As the United States builds a 6G alliance with more than 20 countries across Europe and Asia, analysts say Washington’s efforts to counter Beijing’s growing influence in the next-generation technology face short-term challenges. The alliance, involving 24 countries including the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan, aims to coordinate their governments’ 6G strategies, share technical resources and lay the groundwork for the commercial deployment of the technology, which is expected to begin...
Chinese home appliance maker Midea reported that European demand for its air conditioners continues to soar amid recurrent heatwaves, with two of its factories receiving hundreds of thousands of new orders in a month. The factories, in the eastern city of Wuhu and the southern port city Guangzhou, received new European orders for 200,000 units within a month amid “explosive demand”, the company said in a statement on Wednesday on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange’s investor Q&A platform. The company...
China’s robotics firms have run into a fresh obstacle in their global expansion, after the United States banned imports of new foreign-made models. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) added foreign-produced “advanced robotic devices” to its Covered List on Tuesday, blocking new models from obtaining the authorisation required to be imported and sold in the US. The ban will cover all new humanoids, quadrupeds and a broad range of connected mobile machines, with the FCC citing supply chain...
China’s robotics firms have run into a fresh obstacle in their global expansion, after the United States banned imports of new foreign-made models, which analysts say could benefit Tesla and other American developers. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) added foreign-produced “advanced robotic devices” to its Covered List on Tuesday, blocking new models from obtaining the authorisation required to be imported and sold in the US. The ban will cover all new humanoids, quadrupeds and a...
Google on Wednesday launched its artificial intelligence agent Gemini Spark in the Hong Kong market, giving local users direct access to a smart assistant to manage complex digital workflows. The launch came months after the American tech giant’s decision in March to lift regional geofences for generative AI services, starting with the Gemini chatbot. Hong Kong users can now access Gemini without using a virtual private network or third-party platform. The roll-out of the Spark agent echoes an...
China’s increasing clout in the global semiconductor supply chain is accelerating the unravelling of the artificial-intelligence trade, as expectations grow that the Asian nation will challenge foreign tech juggernauts by supplying the world with cheaper alternative products. The US$9.8 billion stock offering of ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) in Shanghai provided the Chinese maker of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips with equity funding to finance its expansion of market share home...