china-news

Alibaba’s Qwen app has added scheduled tasks, an office assistant, voice calls, a research mode and an agent marketplace, while adding support for the Qwen3.8-Max flagship model. The scheduled-task feature can handle recurring work such as compiling industry news and sorting emai

Unitree Robotics has priced its Shanghai STAR Market IPO at RMB150.80 per share, with 40.45 million shares to be issued. The final strategic-placement list allocated 933,900 shares worth about RMB141 million to Hangzhou DeepSeek AI Basic Technology Research, the developer of Deep

Nio said it completed its 120 millionth battery swap at 8:09 a.m. on Aug. 7. The company also put its 4,000th battery-swap station and the first batch of fifth-generation stations into operation, expanding support across its Nio, Onvo and firefly brands. Nio said its network now

Alibaba is reportedly planning to charge large commercial users of its next open-weight Qwen model by taking a share of the revenue generated from the model’s use. The plan could be introduced as early as next week, but negotiations are still ongoing and the proposed percentage h

Xpeng said its G9L SUV has undergone road testing across 26 countries and regions, covering more than 6.74 million kilometers since the project began three years ago. The company said the testing included complex road conditions and extreme environments. The G9L is positioned as

PokeBot, a Chinese embodied-AI startup, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in a pre-A round led by Shunwei Capital and Matrix Partners. The months-old company is developing household robots for tasks including clothes folding and cooking. A demonstration showed one of it

StepFun, a Chinese AI company, is reportedly reorganizing around two strategic lines: foundation models and agent devices. Its phone business is being moved into a separate company, while the original entity continues to operate the model business; the plan has not been officiall

Nvidia is reportedly seeking a Chinese base-station maker to combine its AI computing platform with wireless network equipment for 6G systems aimed at overseas markets, according to people in the communications supply chain. The report said Nvidia and a Shenzhen-based company, 佳贤

BYD said its Japan-specific small electric car built for the kei-car segment, Racco, had received more than 700 orders after its July 28 launch. Japanese industry data counted only 125 sales during Racco’s first four days, but BYD said most were dealer-registered test-drive vehi

Huawei-backed luxury-car brand Maextro has launched the V800 and V680, its first flagship minivans, expanding the brand’s lineup beyond the S800 sedan. The V680 starts at RMB648,000, while V800 versions are priced from RMB766,000 to RMB1.016 million. Both range-extended models o

Baidu has reportedly begun integrating its internal office agent dodo with Baidu Dazi, moving dodo’s research and development staff and resources into the Dazi team. dodo is used inside Baidu through its messaging app, web and desktop client to summarize meetings, process documen

Apple is reportedly considering China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), a memory-chip maker, as a supplier of mobile DRAM including LPDDR5X, which is used in smartphones and other devices. Talks over pricing have hit a hurdle. CXMT is reportedly seeking prices at or above qu

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming reportedly told the company’s Seed AI research team last month that it would not rely on AI distillation to improve its models, even if that meant temporarily falling behind rivals. AI distillation is a training method in which a smaller model learn

Huawei has launched the MateBook Pro S, a 798-gram laptop powered by its Kirin XE90 PC processor, with prices starting at RMB7,999. The 14.2-inch flexible OLED laptop offers 3.1K resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. Higher-end privacy-screen and collector versions reach RMB10,29

DeepSeek said in a notice that it plans to raise prices for its API services soon, warning users that the increase could be substantial. The company has not published a new price schedule, so the change is planned rather than effective. DeepSeek’s current API pricing distinguish

This week, the latest global automaker sales rankings for the first half of 2026 were released, marking the first time that three Chinese automakers have simultaneously ranked among the world’s top 10 by sales. The latest rankings reflect the continued growth of China’s automotiv

Tencent has integrated its Hy3 large language model into the international edition of WorkBuddy, marking the model’s first rollout in the global version of the AI workspace. Users worldwide can access Hy3 at no cost through Aug. 31, 2026, Pacific Time, under a limited-time offer.

Xiaomi has open-sourced its embodied-AI foundation model Xiaomi-Robotics-1, the company’s technology account announced on Aug. 5. The release covers the full process from real-robot post-training to model deployment and includes code for related benchmark evaluations. Xiaomi-Robo

Chinese commercial rocket company Beijing Interstellar Glory, also known as i-Space, has completed the first tranche of a Series E funding round worth nearly RMB1 billion. The investors are mainly bank-affiliated asset-management institutions, while the broader round remains unde

DeepSeek has reportedly reopened talks for a second funding round targeting RMB50 billion, potentially valuing the Chinese AI company at about RMB500 billion before the financing. The talks could lead to an agreement in late August, but the terms and timing have not been finalize

Chinese optical-module makers have responded to a report that the US Federal Communications Commission is drafting restrictions on imports of new Chinese data-center components, including optical transceivers. Zhongji Innolight said no relevant FCC document had been issued, while

Kaiwang Data (our translation of 恺望数据), a Chinese provider of data infrastructure for embodied AI, has completed a strategic funding round of more than RMB100 million. The round was jointly led by the Beijing E-Town Industrial Upgrade Fund, Huafang Capital and Skyline Capital (ou

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are evaluating chipmaking equipment from China’s Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc. (AMEC) for possible use at their Chinese factories, three people familiar with the matter said. The reported evaluations come as the South Korean memory-chi

ByteDance has launched SeedRealtime, a native audio-video full-duplex model that can continuously process audio, video and text streams while listening and responding in real time. The model is designed to support interactions in which it can watch, listen and speak simultaneousl

Huawei is set to launch a new 18-inch foldable MateBook Fold laptop on Aug. 5. The HarmonyOS device will be 7.3 millimeters thick when unfolded and will add stylus support to the MateBook Fold line. The flagship model uses a dual-layer OLED display with LTPO adaptive refresh, 3.

DeepSeek V4 Flash ranked first in OpenRouter’s weekly model-usage ranking for July 27 to Aug. 2, with 7.22 trillion tokens processed on the multi-model aggregation platform. On Aug. 1, the model processed 8 trillion tokens on OpenCode, including 5 trillion tokens consumed through

Moonshot AI, the Chinese developer of the Kimi chatbot, has reportedly opened a G-round pre-IPO financing at a valuation of $50 billion. A person familiar with the deal said investor interest intensified after Kimi K3 launched, with institutions registering intended commitments.