DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab whose R1 model triggered a rout in US technology stocks in January 2025, is now developing its own artificial intelligence chip designed for inference, the process of running trained models rather than building them.
Gordon Sheng spent months building InkOS, an AI-powered writing platform designed for China’s vast web novel industry.
When Marc Andreessen posted on X that “AI insiders are saying GLM-5.2 is the first Chinese AI model to match and often beat” the top publicly available US models, it was the kind of endorsement that the Chinese AI industry had been working toward for years.
Chinese officials used a press briefing ahead of the World AI Conference 2026 in Shanghai to release figures that together describe the scale of AI’s penetration into China’s industrial economy.
China has surpassed the United States to become the world’s leading source of fintech patent applications, according to a survey conducted by Nikkei Asia in collaboration with Patent Result, a Tokyo-based intellectual property research firm.
A Bloomberg Intelligence survey released on July 7 has put a precise number on a trend that chip industry analysts have been tracking for months: Chinese technology executives plan to allocate 46 percent of their AI accelerator budgets to domestic chip suppliers over the next twelve months, up from 30 percent today.
Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu used a high-profile appearance at the South China Morning Post China Conference 2026 on July 7 to frame artificial intelligence as the defining priority of the city’s economic strategy for the next five years.
When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared at CES in January that “some day, every single car, every single truck will be autonomous,” he was describing a future that is already being built, in part with sensors manufactured by a company the US Department of Defense has designated a Chinese military entity.
For the past five months, American software developers have been running a quiet experiment in cost arbitrage — and the results are reshaping the global AI market. Since February 8, 2026, the share of tokens processed by US companies on Chinese AI models via the OpenRouter gateway has exceeded 30 percent every single week.
China’s Ministry of Commerce has held a series of meetings with the country’s top AI companies over the past month to discuss restricting overseas access to China’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, including models that have not yet been publicly released.
