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).
They are all under 50, all products of China’s elite university system, and all running companies that now compete directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google at the frontier of artificial intelligence.
While the United States and China trade accusations over model distillation and chip export controls, a quieter competition is unfolding in classrooms and summer programs across China’s major cities.
The Trump administration is intensifying pressure on China across multiple fronts, from AI model investigations to fresh tariff threats, in what analysts describe as a deliberate strategy to extract maximum concessions before President Xi Jinping’s scheduled September 24 visit to Washington.
The fragile diplomatic architecture supporting US-China AI cooperation is under severe strain. Just weeks after Washington and Beijing scheduled their first formal AI safety talks for September, a cascade of sanctions threats, distillation accusations, and retaliatory posturing has left the planned dialogue, and potentially the Trump-Xi summit itself, hanging in the balance.
China secured a notable diplomatic win this week as ministers from all 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) member economies adopted the “Chengdu Statement” on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, endorsing a joint framework for cross-border cooperation on AI innovation, connectivity and security.
At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai last week, Arm China quietly unveiled what may become one of the most consequential pieces of infrastructure to come out of the show: the AIOS Alliance, an open-source initiative designed to standardize how AI models run on Chinese-made devices, from smartphones and cars to smart glasses…
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai this month, one exhibit drew a steady crowd of educators, provincial officials and foreign delegates. It was not a humanoid robot or a trillion-parameter foundation model. It was a blackboard.
At a former shopping mall in Hangzhou, cameras roll on as many as ten sets at once inside Linying Studio, a purpose-built microdrama factory that has become a symbol of one of China’s most disruptive entertainment revolutions.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has stepped squarely into the Trump administration’s most contentious AI debate, arguing that American companies should “absolutely” be free to run their workloads on Chinese open-weight models, even as the White House prepares options that could ban them outright.
A Wall Street Journal investigation has pulled back the curtain on the political machinery behind China’s domestic AI chip drive, revealing a top-down mobilization campaign led by Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang, one of Xi Jinping’s most trusted lieutenants.
Two companies that barely registered on the global semiconductor map five years ago are now reshaping the economics of the memory chip industry.
