MiniMax has sharply increased the cloud-computing capacity it is prepared to buy from Alibaba, providing a concrete measure of how expensive China’s leading AI model race has become. South China Morning Post reported that the Shanghai-based company raised the ceiling of its three-year Alibaba Cloud procurement agreement by 220% to US$1.2 billion through 2028.
Lightstandard is betting that the next bottleneck in artificial intelligence will not be only the number of available accelerators, but the speed and energy cost of moving data between them. The Chinese optical-computing company said it had completed multiple financing rounds during the past year and was approaching a post-money valuation of RMB20 billion.
Greater Bay Area AI Computing Tech has reported a sharp first-half shift from a mixed infrastructure business toward AI computing services. In an HKEX filing released on August 28, the Hong Kong-listed company said revenue for the six months to June 30 reached RMB2.55856 billion, an increase of 1,020.9% from a year earlier.
Sharpa has disclosed more than 4.5 billion yuan in funding and is pairing that unusually large sum with a visible commercial test: a Dairy Queen restaurant in Shanghai where a robot is expected to prepare Blizzard ice cream orders.
A Chengdu robotics company is sending a distinctly Chinese form of urban automation into European streets: compact delivery vehicles that carry food, groceries, and logistics orders without a driver. China Daily reported that thousands of Level 4 autonomous delivery robots made by Youngs Tech are now operating in Europe.
China’s five-year legal-education plan places artificial intelligence and big data inside public governance to help citizens understand the law. The 2026–2030 program will, according to Xinhua, introduce AI and big-data tools to tailor public legal education and make it more interactive.
Hong Kong is moving artificial intelligence into one of its most visible public-service channels. The city’s Digital Policy Office has announced four planned AI projects for 1823, the government platform that handles public inquiries and complaints.
Manycore Tech is trying to turn a two-dimensional generative-AI workflow into a three-dimensional production system. TechNode reported on August 28 that Manycore had introduced Lux3D the prior day while starting trials of a future system for modeling interactive environments.
Baidu has launched a benchmark that shifts the question for AI agents away from whether they can write a persuasive response and toward whether they can complete a piece of work.
Tencent’s latest model release is not merely another entry in China’s crowded open-weight market. The company has put a much larger system, Tencent Hy4 preview, into public release while wiring it directly into its existing workplace, coding, consumer, cloud, and developer products.
