3 h. ago Chinese EV maker Li Auto unveils industry’s cheapest AI glasses at US$282

Chinese electric vehicle maker Li Auto has launched its first wearable product, the Livis artificial intelligence glasses, marking a bold foray into the rapidly expanding market already crowded by tech giants like Alibaba Group Holding, Huawei Technologies and Xiaomi. The device is priced at 1,999 yuan (US$282), but buyers who place an order before December 31 qualify for a 15 per cent rebate via the government-backed subsidy programme, bringing down the price to 1,699 yuan. That effectively...

Politics

13 h. ago As China defies US tech blockade, can local AI chipmakers capture Nvidia share?

With the technology race between the United States and China, the world’s two largest economies, intensifying even though a trade truce was reached in late October, analysts say the prospects of China achieving self-sufficiency in semiconductors and artificial intelligence (AI) are positive, despite American efforts to maintain leads in those fields. “If any country can do it [achieve self-sufficiency in semiconductors], it’s China, owing to its vast resources and pool of engineering talent,”...

Politics

13 h. ago Huawei’s founder makes subtle dig at lofty pursuits in AI by the US

The United States and China are pursuing artificial intelligence in “different directions”, and the divergence is being reflected in the strategies that the governments and companies are adopting, according to the founder of one of the world’s largest technology investors. The US is focusing on supercomputing power and large models in the lofty pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI), while China was adopting a more practical approach, using AI to...

Politics

16 h. ago China’s Xiaomi says returns from AI investments ‘far exceed expectations’

Chinese tech firm Xiaomi reaped returns from its artificial intelligence spending in 2025 that “far exceeded expectations”, the company’s president Lu Weibing said in a recorded video posted on Chinese social media platform Douyin. Lu said the Beijing-based company was pivoting to embodied AI after heavy investment in general AI over the past few quarters. The Beijing-based company’s efforts to apply AI in electric vehicles (EVs) and robotics are similar to Elon Musk’s plan of using the advanced...

Politics

17 h. ago Moore Threads aspires to become ‘leading global player’ in AI chips after IPO

Moore Threads, a five-year-old graphics processing unit (GPU) developer created by Nvidia’s former China chief, aspires to become one of the leading global players in artificial intelligence chip development, its founder and CEO Zhang Jianzhong said. Zhang, Nvidia’s China general manager from 2006 to 2020, was quoted as saying by the official Shanghai Securities Journal that the start-up would introduce a new-generation chip each year to provide key hardware for China’s AI development. “Our goal...

Politics

24 h. ago Moore Threads shares dazzle with fivefold jump in Shanghai debut

Moore Threads Technology surged by more than fivefold in Shanghai, as enthusiastic investors vied to get shares of the Beijing-based semiconductor supplier used in artificial intelligence, helping to mark the second-biggest trading debut in China’s stock market this year. Moore’s shares began trading at 650 yuan amid a declining market, a 468 per cent jump from their initial public offering (IPO) price of 114.28 yuan. China’s benchmark CSI300 Index slipped 0.1 per cent. The surge in Moore...

Politics

50 h. ago Guangdong touts Huawei chips and HarmonyOS to outrun the DeepSeek eclipse

Guangdong has named Huawei Technologies’ artificial intelligence chips and HarmonyOS operating system as flagship achievements in China’s drive for technological self-sufficiency. The push by China’s wealthiest province – whose gross domestic product is larger than that of South Korea – to highlight home-grown innovation came as local governments faced mounting peer pressure to support Beijing’s strategic goals. Guangdong, which includes the tech hub of Shenzhen, suffered a bruised ego earlier...

Politics

52 h. ago Nvidia CEO meets Trump, says he’s not sure if China would accept H200 chips

Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said he was unsure whether China would accept the company’s H200 artificial intelligence chips should the United States relax restrictions on sales of the processors, following a meeting Wednesday with US President Donald Trump. Addressing reporters at the US Capitol, Huang said he and Trump talked about export controls but declined to offer specifics. The Nvidia chief’s meeting with the president comes after Trump administration officials discussed...

Politics

63 h. ago China trains industry AI tool using ‘world’s largest’ port operation data set

China is training an artificial intelligence tool to support the country’s port industry using what the National Development and Reform Commission said was the “world’s largest” port operation data set. The AI application draws on data covering “the most comprehensive range of port business scenarios”, according to Li Chao, deputy director of the NDRC’s policy research office. “It will provide strong support for technological research and development as well as verification in areas such as port...

Politics

65 h. ago Alibaba’s Qwen app becomes the world’s fastest growing AI app as MAUs surge 149%

Alibaba Group Holding’s new flagship artificial intelligence app Qwen was the fastest growing AI app in the world in November, according to third-party data released on Wednesday. Qwen recorded the highest growth in monthly active users (MAU) among AI products globally at 149 per cent, data compiled by AI product popularity tracker Aicpb.com showed. Its MAUs for the app reached 18.34 million, making it the world’s 24th most used AI app just two weeks into its public beta. Qwen’s success stemmed...

Politics

3 d. ago Ant Group’s LingGuang a hit as users create millions of flash apps with AI tool

LingGuang, an artificial intelligence vibe coding tool by Ant Group, has become a mini-app factory, helping users create 3.3 million flash apps in the two weeks since its launch, according to the Chinese fintech giant. Launched on November 18, LingGuang is a multimodal AI assistant that can generate simple apps in as little as 30 seconds in response to the users’ natural language prompts. Ant is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post. In the past two...

Events

3 d. ago Why the real AI race is within China and not across the Pacific

For much of the global debate, the race for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy has been framed as a binary contest between the United States and China. As Washington envisions it, victory hinges on frontier models and compute scale, a battle dominated by a handful of American labs. China is cast as the challenger, constrained by export controls and dependent on catching up. That narrative is increasingly outdated. China is not pursuing a single AI strategy. It is running three large-scale...

Politics

3 d. ago China looks to AI and big data to guard against Western values

China will use new technology, especially artificial intelligence, to guard against Western influence and reinforce its own ideology, according to state media. At a study session of the Politburo, the Communist Party’s top decision-making body, on Friday, President Xi Jinping said new technologies such as AI and big data posed challenges to cyberspace governance but they also presented opportunities. According to state news agency Xinhua, Xi called for efforts to develop new information...

Politics

3 d. ago Kuaishou debuts multimodal AI video model with ‘Nano Banana’ editing capability

Chinese short video platform Kuaishou on Monday launched a new artificial intelligence video generation model to challenge OpenAI’s Sora and start-up Runway in the global market for AI content creation. Kuaishou, which competes with TikTok’s Chinese sibling Douyin in China, said Kling O1 was the first unified multimodal video model in the industry, based on an architecture that integrated diverse video creation tasks – generation, precise and controllable editing and understanding – into a...

Culture

3 d. ago China’s DeepSeek challenges Google DeepMind with new AI model

Artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek has unveiled its most powerful model variant, DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, which is said to match Google DeepMind’s new Gemini 3 Pro model in certain tasks, despite the Chinese firm having limited access to advanced semiconductor chips. The achievement by the open-source lab has sparked extensive discussion within the AI research community as it coincides with the prestigious annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS. In its...

Politics

3 d. ago Nvidia takes US$2 billion stake in Synopsys as AI deal spree accelerates

Nvidia has invested US$2 billion in chip design software maker Synopsys as part of an expanded multi-year tie-up to jointly develop new tools for designing products across industries using its AI technology. The deal, unveiled by the companies on Monday, comes as Nvidia has carried out a range of investments, such as those in OpenAI and Anthropic, to try to cement its dominance in the artificial intelligence market. The Synopsys deal is about shifting the work of several hi-tech industries that...

Economics

4 d. ago ByteDance teams up with ZTE as China races to take on Apple in agentic AI phones

TikTok owner ByteDance has entered the race against Apple to define the future of smartphones by putting its artificial intelligence agent Doubao into a ZTE-made handset. The Beijing-based company on Monday launched the Doubao Mobile Assistant in a technical preview, describing it as “an operating-system-level collaboration between ByteDance’s Doubao [AI model] and mobile phone manufacturers” that “brings more convenient interaction and richer capabilities”, according to a post on Monday on its...

Politics

6 d. ago Beyond DeepSeek: Moonshot and MiniMax step up as China’s new frontier AI labs

Chinese artificial intelligence start-ups Moonshot AI and MiniMax have emerged as China’s strongest contenders to rival US frontier labs in 2025 – even as DeepSeek has stolen the spotlight as the poster child for the country’s AI ambitions. Moonshot AI, founded by 33-year-old Yang Zhilin, has sharply raised its profile in China’s AI ecosystem with the launch earlier this month of Kimi K2 Thinking, an upgraded reasoning model. The system outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet...

Politics

6 d. ago China consumers use AI to alter product photos, claim refunds for ‘damaged’ goods

Fake photos generated by artificial intelligence (AI) are being misused to claim refunds from Chinese online shops, sparking moral and legal concerns. As China’s Double 11 shopping festival took place around November 11, several e-commerce shop owners revealed that they received AI-generated photos of damaged products from consumers attempting to seek refunds. Some people took photographs of fruit they received, then asked AI to make them look mouldy. An electric toothbrush seller said a buyer...

Events

7 d. ago Alibaba Cloud team wins top AI award for breakthrough in model efficiency

A research team led by Alibaba Cloud was the only group from China to receive a top award at this year’s NeurIPS, or the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, billed as the artificial intelligence industry’s most prestigious annual event. The research could lead to drastic improvements in the efficiency of large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing both training and inference costs for Alibaba Group Holding’s next generation of Qwen models without sacrificing...

Events