Jaime Xiao

Jaime Xiao is a technology analyst and advisor specialising in China’s innovation economy. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of RobotBelt.com, a market intelligence publication tracking the convergence of artificial intelligence, automotive and robotics. His beat is the Robot Belt, the manufacturing corridor of southeastern China that is becoming the world’s command centre for embodied AI. He lives and works inside it.

Jaime is a trusted advisor to private equity funds, family offices and OEMs across APAC, Europe and North America, supporting market entry, competitive positioning and investment evaluation, including localised due diligence on hard-tech deals at the billion-RMB scale. His expertise is cited by major financial publications: by Bloomberg for his analysis of China’s AI sector, including DeepSeek’s investor-cap layer, and by the Financial Times’ fDi Intelligence for his commentary on Chinese industrial robotics exports. His methodology bridges hardware and capital: where software-only analysts see models and policy-only analysts see directives, he tracks how infrastructure, hardware constraints (domestic GPU compute) and state-directed capital intersect to shape tech markets.

His coverage spans the stack. In AI, China’s foundation model ecosystem (DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen, ByteDance, Moonshot) and the capital layer funding it. In automotive, the OEM wars (BYD, NIO, XPeng, Li Auto, Xiaomi, Huawei), the monthly wholesale and retail data that settles arguments, and the consumer behaviour that decides them. In robotics, embodied AI and humanoids, from Tesla Optimus and Figure AI to UBTech, Fourier and Galbot.

Jaime writes from inside the corridor, not above it. He serves as Chief Strategic Advisor for Robotics and Future Mobility at TCB Bearing, a precision manufacturer in his home town of Zhongshan that is pivoting into the EV and humanoid supply chains he writes about. Earlier roles took him from coordinating pelagic fishing operations off Mauritania to running an insurance branch in Wuhan, with fourteen years in Australia along the way. Most commentary on Chinese industry is written by people who have never stood on a factory floor. Jaime spends his working week on them.

His signature frameworks include the Robot Belt (the geography of embodied AI), the Automaton Dividend (where value accrues when humanoids enter the supply chain), the Alpha Curve (why capital enters and exits industrial champions, from BYD to the next wave) and the Oversupply of AI Talent (how China’s gaokao machine turns mathematical grassroots into strategic depth).

Jaime also writes literary essays and social commentary in Chinese under the pen name Xiao Chengzhang. He is working on The Smart Car Revolution, a book on the collision between the car industry and intelligent computing.