57 h. ago Chinese loans fuel Angola’s future cities but analysts cautious over the costs

Since nearly three decades of civil war ended in 2002, Angola has been relying heavily on China – its key financier of post-war infrastructure – to help the southern African country’s government deliver on its promise of a million new homes. When the West was unwilling to finance its projects, Luanda secured loans from Chinese state banks under the so-called Angolan model, using its oil as collateral. Angola became the largest recipient of Chinese financing in Africa, attracting 270 loans worth...

Politics

7 d. ago Global monthly EV sales hit record 2.1 million, with 62% Chinese

Global electric vehicle (EV) sales hit a record last month, buoyed by Chinese consumers’ growing interest in new models and the rising popularity of battery-powered cars in Europe. Worldwide September deliveries of pure-electric cars and plug-in hybrids jumped 24 per cent from a year earlier to 2.1 million units – breaking 2 million for the first time and topping the previous record of 1.9 million in December, according to London-based consultancy Rho Motion. The figure represented 20 per cent...

Economics

7 d. ago China’s EV giants head overseas, Tesla Shanghai plant boosts output: 7 EV reads

We have put together stories from our coverage on electric and new energy vehicles from the past two weeks to help you stay informed. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. Tesla’s Shanghai factory deliveries hit record as Model Y variant woos buyers Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory saw a jump in deliveries last month, as its upgraded models struck a chord with wealthy Chinese consumers who favour spacious vehicles. 2. As China’s EV boom makes the EU anxious,...

Politics

1 week ago Tesla’s Shanghai factory deliveries hit record as Model Y variant woos buyers

Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory saw a jump in deliveries last month, as its upgraded models struck a chord with wealthy Chinese consumers who favour spacious vehicles. The assembly line - based in the Lingang free-trade zone, a coastal area linked to the Yangshan Deep-water Port - delivered a total of 90,812 vehicles to customers in September, a record high this year, up 2.8 per cent from the same period in 2024, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA). Compared to its...

Events

1 week ago Chinese fintech giant Ant releases powerful AI model to rival DeepSeek, OpenAI

Chinese fintech giant Ant Group has released a new open-source, trillion-parameter large language model (LLM) that boasts stronger maths and coding capabilities than rival models from DeepSeek and OpenAI, escalating the intense competition in artificial intelligence systems. The new general-purpose Ling-1T model, with 1 trillion parameters, demonstrated “superior complex reasoning ability and overall advantage” against both open-source and closed-source rivals, the company said on Thursday. It...

Economics

2 w. ago France unveils yet another government. It also faces risk of collapse

French President Emmanuel Macron named a new government on Sunday, putting together a team under Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu as he struggles to pull the country out of a political crisis. The new cabinet line-up was unveiled nearly a month after the appointment of Lecornu, Macron’s seventh prime minister. The latest premier risks being toppled by the opposition in a deeply divided parliament despite his efforts to obtain cross-party support. Bruno Le Maire, who served as economy minister...

Politics

2 w. ago AI safety isn’t a barrier to innovation, it’s the key to value: HKU professor

Debates are raging around the world about how artificial intelligence should be developed. Some are calling for strengthened guardrails to guarantee the powerful technology is developed safely, while others argue that doing so would risk kneecapping a fast-moving industry. But that is a false dichotomy, according to Jack Jiang, an innovation and information management professor at Hong Kong University (HKU) Business School. He said AI safety and development are two sides of the same coin because...

Politics

2 w. ago Chinese AI models deemed a security risk by new US government report

Chinese models lag behind their American counterparts in performance, cost, security and adoption, despite their growing global popularity, according to a new report from the US government. Describing Chinese models as “adversary AI”, the report released on Tuesday by the Centre for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Department of Commerce claimed that models such as those from DeepSeek posed risks to AI developers, consumers...

Events

3 w. ago China’s Z.ai targets US AI leaders with new flagship model as coding wars heat up

Chinese artificial intelligence unicorn Z.ai has released a new flagship model, the GLM-4.6, with improved coding abilities, hinting at the start-up’s ambition to compete with American industry leaders Anthropic and OpenAI in the key battleground of coding agents. Beijing-based Z.ai, formerly known as Zhipu, said on Tuesday that GLM-4.6 had “competitive advantages” over leading domestic and international models such as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4, released in May, and DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp, released...

Events

3 w. ago Is China’s ‘going global’ strategy at risk after US widens its trade blacklist?

Washington’s decision to broaden its trade blacklist could put many overseas subsidiaries of Chinese firms under scrutiny, potentially disrupting their “going global” strategies and reigniting trade tensions between the two superpowers, analysts said. The US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced on Monday that any company at least 50 per cent owned by firms already on the US Entity List or the Military End-User List – which target entities Washington deems a security threat – will now...

Events

3 w. ago Alibaba model tops global AI rankings as Chinese open systems flourish

Alibaba Group Holding’s new Qwen3-Omni multimodal artificial intelligence system has quickly become the most popular model in the world’s largest open-source AI community, challenging closed systems from OpenAI and Google while underscoring the growing popularity of Chinese open AI systems. Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B, a variant from the Qwen3-Omni series, ranked top on Hugging Face’s trending model list as of Monday, followed by image editing model Qwen-Image-Edit-2509. Alibaba owns the Post. Alibaba’s...

Politics

3 w. ago How Huawei and DeepSeek are helping China break reliance on US chips

When Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek unveiled an updated foundational model late in August, investors in Nvidia were stunned. Shares of the US chip giant slid, as market watchers grappled with news that the two-year-old start-up, which has developed models rivalling the world’s best, was shifting towards supporting domestically produced chips. Adding to their concerns, DeepSeek was not alone in its endeavour to empower China’s AI ambitions without relying on US technology. Last...

Politics

3 w. ago How Huawei and DeepSeek are tending the garden of China’s AI aspirations

When Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek unveiled an updated foundational model late in August, investors in Nvidia were stunned. Shares of the US chip giant slid, as market watchers grappled with news that the two-year-old start-up, which has developed models rivalling the world’s best, was shifting towards supporting domestically produced chips. Adding to their concerns, DeepSeek was not alone in its endeavour to empower China’s AI ambitions without relying on US technology. Last...

Politics

4 w. ago DeepSeek sets example for AI firms to have work peer reviewed, experts say

DeepSeek’s landmark peer-reviewed article featured in the British journal Nature could encourage other Chinese artificial intelligence companies to submit their work to major scientific publications, according to AI experts. Hangzhou-based DeepSeek set a “very good example” for future AI model releases from both Chinese and US firms, according to Huan Sun, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at Ohio State University. “I hope frontier model developers could follow suit and...

Economics