The Belt Shihang Intelligent, a global marine embodied-robot company, announced on 15 June that it had closed a Series A round of more than RMB 1 billion, the largest single-round raise recorded in the global marine-robotics sector. The round gathered a slate of industrial and mainstream investors: Shanghe Momentum Fund (the industrial arm of Moore Threads and … Read more
Maibu Robotics, a Shenzhen developer of medical and elderly-care exoskeleton robots, has closed a new strategic round of nearly RMB 100 million, with CICCI (China Jianyin Investment) leading, 36Kr reported. The proceeds will speed up product iteration and the commercialisation of frontier areas such as brain-computer interfaces, and extend coverage from hospitals and communities into … Read more
World models were the soul of this year’s WAIC conference, and the question running through every session was blunt: how does a model actually understand the physical world and step into it? At a dedicated forum on 19 July, Kunlun Wanwei chairman and chief executive Fang Han declared 2026 the first year of the world … Read more
Two days, three frontier launches, and the fastest overtake took five hours. On 2 September Google and Meta each released a new model: Gemini 3.8 Flash, Google’s third Flash iteration in six weeks, and Muse Spark 1.3, Meta’s fourth Spark in five months. Within hours Meta’s model had overtaken Google’s same-day release on the Artificial … Read more
China’s two flagship AI model startups are rebuilding themselves as token merchants. A model-industry headhunter told the Silicon Lab research desk that both Zhipu and MiniMax are hiring B2B token salespeople at home and abroad, asking for three-plus years of experience at a cloud vendor or MaaS platform, ideally with coding skills of their own. … Read more
At the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on 22 August, a humanoid robot stood on a real tennis court and returned balls travelling faster than 50 km/h, judging the landing point in milliseconds, stepping, twisting and swinging. It served, played forehands and backhands, moved its opponent around the baseline, volleyed at the net, … Read more
The world’s oldest consumer-electronics fair opened in Berlin on 4 September looking less like a gadget show and more like a parade of Chinese physical AI. Of roughly 2,000 exhibitors at IFA 2026, more than 932 came from mainland China, a number that tops 1,000 with Hong Kong and Taiwan firms included, close to half … Read more
Two weeks after debuting as the first humanoid-robot company on China’s A-share market, Unitree has lost more than RMB 230 billion of market value. By the close on 4 September its shares sat at RMB 530.30, giving a market capitalisation of RMB 214.5 billion, roughly half the RMB 444.9 billion peak reached on listing day. … Read more
On 17 August, Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-27B became the most popular model on Hugging Face. The response from the global AI community was striking less for the ranking itself than for what the model represents: a 27-billion-parameter open-weights model, small enough to run on a single consumer GPU, posting coding and agent scores that sit on the … Read more
Two announcements landed within hours of each other in early September, and together they frame the next fight in AI: who defines consumer computing once models run on the desk instead of in the cloud. On 1 September Tim Cook stepped down as Apple chief executive to become executive chairman, handing the company to John … Read more