Weekly Dose of China Tech [9.21.2026]
Z.ai apologized and said it fixed a default-enabled codebase indexing feature in its AI coding tool ZCode after a developer discovered a 313MB encrypted snapshot on September 18 containing roughly 345…
Z.ai apologized and said it fixed a default-enabled codebase indexing feature in its AI coding tool ZCode after a developer discovered a 313MB encrypted snapshot on September 18 containing roughly 345…
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are calling for slower development of frontier AI while pushing for Washington-Beijing talks on preventing catastrophe, according to the article. A…
BYD reached 1,000 orders in Japan within two weeks of launching a tiny electric kei-car on July 28, the fastest order ramp for any BYD model in that market, as the company crossed 50% overseas revenue…
Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN unveiled the Arabic-language model humain-m3, commissioned from MiniMax, on September 3, and France's Mistral AI raised €3 billion at a valuation exceeding €21 billion, developme…
China's AI infrastructure buildout is shifting focus from chips to electricity, memory, and data centers, with Ulanqab's computing capacity jumping from 3.3GW to 12.5GW in under a year, and CXMT's LPD…
China's Ulanqab region has become a major AI computing hub, with data center capacity jumping from 3.3 gigawatts in July 2025 to 12.5 gigawatts by June 2026, driven by a strategic bet that electricity…
China's AI race is shifting from model development to infrastructure and business sustainability, with Alibaba and Tencent pursuing contrasting strategies: Alibaba is rebuilding around AI infrastructu…
Tencent and Alibaba reported massive capital expenditures for AI infrastructure, with Tencent's quarterly capex reaching RMB 52.8 billion (up 176% year-over-year) and Alibaba's reaching RMB 67.7 billi…
China shipped almost 20,000 humanoid robots in 2025, fueling a new independent repair industry of 'robot doctors' who fix robots faster and cheaper, though they face challenges such as scarce custom c…
ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 and MiniMax's H3, released on the same day two weeks ago, have propelled China to dominate the AI video race, with nine of the top 10 text-to-video systems on Artificial Analy…
The FCC is preparing restrictions on Chinese optical transceivers, causing shares of Zhongji Innolight and Eoptolink to briefly fall nearly 10% in a single day, though Coherent's factory in Wuxi compl…
China's enterprise AI market is moving beyond the model race, with 2025 data from the China Large Model Procurement Monitoring Report recording more than 7,500 large-model-related procurement contract…
DeepSeek released the API version of DeepSeek-V4-Flash, an agentic upgrade with improved tool use and multi-step task completion, priced to undercut competitors. Meanwhile, CXMT went public on Shangha…
Liang Wenfeng, founder of Chinese quant trading firm High-Flyer and AI lab DeepSeek, is viewed abroad as a symbol of China's technological rise after DeepSeek's R1 model trained at a fraction of Weste…
Chinese AI models Kimi K3 and DeepSeek are forcing Silicon Valley to rethink assumptions about the AI race, with Moonshot pausing new Kimi K3 subscriptions less than 48 hours after launch due to overw…
DeepSeek and Moonshot's Kimi K3, not China's other AI labs, have shaken Silicon Valley by disproving two foundational assumptions about AI: DeepSeek challenged the cost curve by matching frontier perf…
DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng told investors during a four-hour fundraising meeting that the company's sole goal is achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), rejecting distractions such as 3D …
China has built more than 400 humanoid robot models and accounts for nearly 70% of global quadruped robot sales, but at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, the robots were repeti…
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-source model likely the largest by parameter count globally, ahead of WAIC. Apple selected Alibaba to power AI on every iPhone in China. Mea…
Tencent's office-agent platform WorkBuddy has become China's largest product in its category with 8.85 million monthly active users, according to a report from Chinese research firm Analysys. The AI a…