Yang Zhilin was known as “Yang the genius” by his classmates at Tsinghua University, and the label has followed him across two continents, through doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon, internships at Google Brain and Meta’s FAIR, and back to Beijing, where he founded Moonshot AI in early 2023.
Beijing has become China’s most consequential venture capitalist, and the numbers are striking. According to data from Zerone cited by the South China Morning Post, government-linked investors went from fewer than 10 AI deals per year before 2018 to more than 140 deals in 2025, a roughly 15-fold increase in less than a decade.
China is engaged in a fevered, state-backed campaign to develop domestic alternatives to American AI chips, led by Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang, a confidant of President Xi Jinping, who initiated the push after Washington’s export controls threatened to cripple China’s AI ambitions.
As AI models expand beyond 1 trillion parameters, a new concept has come to dominate China’s computing landscape: the supernode.
China’s total computing power reached 962 exaflops (EFLOPS) in 2025, ranking second globally and accounting for approximately 21% of worldwide AI computing capacity, according to the 2025 China Server Industry Development Report released at the Smart Computing Foundation event in late July.
Baidu’s board of directors has approved a voluntary conversion of its secondary listing status on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to a dual-primary listing, the company announced on July 22.
Tesla has rolled out a major software upgrade for its vehicles in China, introducing a localized dual-AI voice assistant that replaces SpaceXAI’s Grok model used in North America and other markets.
China’s rapid progress in open-source AI has fractured Silicon Valley in a way that few predicted.
Xi Jinping’s speech at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai was widely covered as an endorsement of open-source AI and a rebuke of US chip restrictions.
DeepSeek has verbally informed prospective investors that it will not sign investment agreements for its second funding round, pausing a raise that had targeted a valuation of approximately 500 billion yuan, roughly $74 billion, and sought to raise up to 50 billion yuan ($7.4 billion).
