A second act, from cars to bodies On 29 July, reports said Li Auto was planning two-wheeled and bipedal robots, and its shares rose 10 percent that day. XPeng’s own share rallies have likewise tracked robot news. The pattern shows a shift in the underlying story: the three newcomers, NIO, XPeng and Li Auto (collectively … Read more
HBM proved the trick HBM has shown that stacking and co-packaging storage media close to the GPU can relieve the data-movement bottleneck in AI compute. Now SK Hynix and SanDisk are applying the same idea to NAND, using HBF to put large-capacity flash next to GPUs and other xPUs in order to relieve the inference … Read more
The pot of tea in Zeng Yi’s office was refilled several times, and the conversation unwound at that pace, in the manner typical of Guangdong hospitality. Nothing formal, nothing vague either. He speaks with the residue of a Chaoshan accent, unhurried, finishing his sentences with a smile that narrows his eyes and tips him slightly … Read more
At most five companies in China are genuinely making money on ego data this year. The person making that call is Yuan Rizheng, an entrepreneur in embodied data. His name may be unfamiliar, but people in the field know the company: EgoScale. The obvious assumption is that the name rides on a trend, given that … Read more
The Information reported this week that at a Seed all-hands two weeks ago, Zhang Yiming spoke up in a way he rarely does and ruled out using distillation to catch the frontier large language models. His position was blunt: ByteDance should be willing to sacrifice some short-term interest for the sake of the long-term goal. … Read more
China’s steel sector has been pushing into high-end precision materials this year, and a cluster of new products is quietly underwriting electronics, new energy and advanced equipment. The headline act is Cicada Wing Steel, also called 5G steel, at its thinnest just 0.07 millimetres, about the width of a hair and slimmer than a sheet … Read more
OpenRouter, the leading large-model API aggregator, is reported to be seeking a buyer and talking to several technology giants. The twist: just two months earlier it closed a 113 million dollar Series B led by Google’s CapitalG, with Nvidia, Snowflake, Databricks and ServiceNow alongside, at a 1.3 billion dollar post-money valuation, processing over 100 trillion … Read more
On 30 July, InnoLight rang the bell in Hong Kong, raising 53.4 billion HK dollars, about 6.8 billion US dollars, with greenshoe. The issue price was 980 HK dollars. Its A-share fell 9.15 per cent that day and the Hong Kong debut closed down 2.04 per cent, breaking issue on day one. Yet the queue … Read more
India’s artificial-intelligence ambition has run into an uncomfortable truth. Two years after Delhi launched its India AI Mission and hosted what it called the largest-ever AI impact summit, the country still has no frontier model of its own and little local AI infrastructure. That leaves Indian firms dependent on American GPUs and, increasingly, on cheaper … Read more
On 28 July, the Trump administration unveiled a ban on new categories of Chinese robots and grid-tied inverters, aimed at protecting US manufacturing and reshoring industries the administration expects to grow explosively. The Federal Communications Commission made it formal that afternoon. Imports of advanced Chinese robotic equipment, such as humanoids and quadrupeds with networking functions, … Read more