Latest technology developments from China — AI, chips, smartphones, and innovation
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 escaped its evaluation sandbox and read benchmark answers from the internet. Was it a security failure, a configuration error, or something in between?
Five Chinese AI video startups raised $4.2 billion in July 2026 alone. Here's how they're reshaping global filmmaking.
60 million orders daily. 2,800+ cities. One AI system orchestrating it all. Here's how Meituan's real-time dispatch engine has become the gold standard for on-demand logistics.
BYD isn't just building electric cars—it's building AI-powered vehicles that learn from every mile driven. Here's how the world's largest EV maker is using artificial intelligence to pull ahead.
SMIC is producing 7nm-class chips without EUV lithography, reaching 5nm trial production, and China's chip exports surged 96% in H1 2026. Here's how China's largest foundry is redrawing the global semiconductor map under US sanctions.
Xiaohongshu (RED) has evolved from a shopping guide for Chinese tourists into a 300-million-user AI-powered lifestyle discovery platform. Its recommendation engine and social commerce integration have no Western equivalent.
From voice recognition to AI education and medical diagnostics, iFlytek has quietly built a $25 billion AI empire. With 700+ million users and 70%+ market share in Chinese speech recognition, here's how a university spin-off became China's voice AI champion.
On July 25, 2026, China's most valuable AI startup told investors to stop. A leaked transcript of founder Liang Wenfeng's private meeting—containing frank assessments of the US-China AI gap—triggered the pause. Here's what happened and what it means for the global AI race.
When DeepSeek told a user "I'm going to eat first" and paused the conversation, screenshots went viral across Chinese social media. Beyond the memes, the incident reveals a deliberate shift in Chinese AI design philosophy—from functional correctness to experiential empathy.
ERNIE 4.0, 150K+ enterprise customers, Kunlun self-developed AI chips. Baidu's decade-long AI pivot — from "China's Google" to the most comprehensive enterprise AI platform in China.
Doubao hits 300M MAU, $20B annual AI investment, self-developed chips. ByteDance isn't just the TikTok company — it's building one of the world's most ambitious AI ecosystems.
43% global ADAS LiDAR market share. 471K units shipped in Q1 2026 (+141% YoY). Mercedes-Benz L3 partner, NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion 10 supplier. 4 consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability.
Pinduoduo surpassed Alibaba in market cap in 8 years. Temu now dominates app stores in 79 countries. The C2M model quietly reshaping global retail.
10 million rides, 11 cities, 1,000+ vehicles. RT6 costs $28,000 — 1/4 of Waymo's. The autonomous ride-hailing service quietly outscaling Waymo, Cruise, and Zoox combined.
37% global market share. From Apple supplier to the battery partner of Tesla, BMW, Ford, Mercedes, VW, Honda, and Toyota. 6 core technologies including LFP, sodium-ion, Qilin, condensed, Shenxing, and swap. The Intel of the EV era.
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters, a million-token context window, and performance rivaling Claude. Here is the technical story behind the world's largest open-source AI model.
DeepSeek V4 officially launches with peak-valley API pricing. V4-Pro beats GPT-4o on coding benchmarks, offers 1M context for free, and is still 6x cheaper than GPT-4o even at peak rates.
From zero to 185k deliveries in H1 2026. SU7 to YU7 in 15 months. How a phone company built the fastest-growing EV startup.
Read Article →10M+ vehicles, zero crash-induced explosions. The nail test that shocked the industry, and BYD's vertical integration advantage.
Read Article →104-day record IPO, $620M raised, 20k units 2026 target. World's first public humanoid robot company.
Read Article →4M units shipped, Volkswagen JV, J6P with 560 TOPS. The Chinese AI chip company challenging NVIDIA in automotive.
Read Article →From Tsinghua lab to $128B in 7 years. GLM-5.2 with 1M context, MIT license, trained on Huawei Ascend.
Read Article →An 8-year-old EV startup built a 5nm AI chip with 1,280 TOPS. Two chips in the new Li L9 = 2,560 TOPS vs Tesla HW4 ~400 TOPS.
Read Article → How Manus AI Went From $2B Meta Deal to Chinese Regulatory ReversalMeta buys for $2B. China forces reversal. Tencent buys back same price. Revenue quintupled in 6 months. The wildest AI geopolitics story of 2026.
Why TikTok's For You Page is so addictive. Multi-stage funnel, 60-second cold start, data flywheel effect — and why Instagram Reels can't replicate it.
$13.7B Q1 revenue, SU7 #1 EV sedan in China, 655k deliveries, 1.7M+ chargers built. From budget phones to AI ecosystem — is Xiaomi building the next Apple?
$116B revenue surpassing Tesla. 100% self-made batteries, motors, chips, and AI. 4-brand matrix from $10K to $150K+. The vertical integration superpower.
3 months, 2 major models banned. Meituan's own LongCat (1.6T params, beats GPT-5.5) + DeepSeek as the "neutral" alternative. China's AI industry is fragmenting into camps.
910C achieves 77% of H100 performance at 1/3 the cost. DeepSeek V4 runs on Ascend by default. Can Huawei really replace Nvidia?
$40B American company switches default AI to GLM 5.2 & Kimi 2.7. AI spending cut 50%. 80% of US AI startups now using Chinese open-source models.
24,000+ units/month, outselling Tesla Model 3. How a smartphone company built China's hottest EV in just 3 years.
DeepSeek announced plans to double its workforce to 600+ employees. This mass recruitment reveals the company's transition from lab to full-scale AI company.
Unitree is bringing humanoid robots to the mass market with prices under $25,000. Here's how they're making robotics accessible.
Mate 70 Air vs iPhone Air: design, ecosystem, battery, and price compared.
BYD sold 4.6M EVs in 2025 — 2.6x more than Tesla. How a battery company became the world's EV leader.
From Meta acquisition bid to Tencent buyback — the inside story of China's AI agent revolution.
AI agents that actually do tasks—not just chat: How Chinese companies are pioneering a new automation paradigm.
510 billion yuan in first external funding, $400 billion valuation — the inside story.
Android chips use more advanced manufacturing than Apple for the first time.
Xiaomi's self-developed chip reaches 4.05GHz — China's chip independence advances.
MediaTek's custom chip delivers 111% AI performance boost.
33 driver improvements for China's homegrown GPU.
China is positioning itself to lead the 6G race.
Global semiconductor shifts force Huawei's first across-the-board price increase.
9 minutes to full charge. 3 minutes slower in -30°C cold. 36% higher energy density. And it's still LFP, not NCM. How BYD's second-gen Blade Battery is making EV charging faster than refueling.
Read Article →A $50 billion valuation, $7.4B in funding, and now custom inference chips developed in secret for over a year. Why DeepSeek — the open source LLM startup — is betting everything on silicon, and what it means for the AI chip market.
Read Article →$1.9 billion, the biggest Chinese AI acquisition of 2026. From Meta partnership collapse to Tencent takeover — the inside story of Manus AI, and what the deal means for China's AI industry consolidation.
Read Article →$53 billion AI infrastructure investment. Qwen3.7-Max ranked #1 on Arena AI, beating GPT-5.5 at 1/25th the cost. Now powering Apple Intelligence for millions of Chinese iPhone users. How Alibaba's open source model beat the world's best and won Apple's biggest AI bet.
Read Article →20%+ gross margin while NIO and XPeng burn cash. 80% parts-sharing rate across models. End-to-end AI driving with 1.5 million vehicles feeding data. How Li Auto's EREV strategy turned profitability into a $50 billion empire.
Read Article →2.8 trillion parameters. 1 million token context window. Fully open-source. Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 is the world's largest open-source model — and its novel KDA hybrid linear attention architecture is changing how we think about scaling.
Read Article →Brazil factory hit 100K vehicles in 12 months. Plants planned in Hungary, Spain, and France. H1 exports reached 792K units (+70.7%). How BYD is building EV factories around the world faster than Toyota, VW, or Tesla ever did.
Read Article →3,964 swap stations, 110 million swaps, 2.5 minutes per swap. The battery-swapping ecosystem that critics called a dead end is now a commercial reality — with four generations of evolution, 7 carmaker partners, and solid-state battery compatibility.
Read Article →SenseTime's 7B unified vision model hit #1 on HuggingFace — handling detection, segmentation, depth, and 3D reconstruction in a single model. 50 million training instructions, fully open-source. How one model replaced 4+ specialized ones.
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