China’s 3D-stacking chip startups share a label but solve three different problems. A teardown of the logic-recombine, memory-expand and compute-in-storage routes, and why domestic firms bet on the third.
Spot prices for NVIDIA’s B300 have climbed from about 570,000 dollars to more than 1.7 million dollars a unit in China since Lunar New Year. The scramble is reshaping how Chinese buyers source compute, build inference chips and price tokens.
Sand.ai released and open sourced MAGI-2 Preview, a 114-billion-parameter mixture of experts video model that activates about 6 billion parameters per forward pass and ranks sixth globally on image to video.
Chinese world model startups disclosed about 30 billion yuan of funding in the first half of 2026, rising above 90 billion yuan once embodied AI is included. IDEA chair scientist Zhang Lei argues most of what is being funded does not qualify.
Paul Meade, the Apple vice president who ran Vision Pro hardware engineering for seven years, is joining OpenAI’s hardware team after a reorganisation left him reporting a layer further down.
Etched has raised 800 million dollars at a 5 billion dollar valuation with backing from TSMC, Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li, plus a 1 billion dollar pre-production order for a chip that runs nothing but Transformers.
XBOT founder Tang Mu, formerly of Xiaomi and Tencent, expects at least 100,000 robot coffee kiosks in China within three years, twice the combined store count of Luckin and Cotti.
China’s planning agency confirmed that eight of every ten humanoid and quadruped robots sold globally are made in China. Unitree filed for a domestic listing on first-half revenue of more than 1.05 billion yuan.
A UC San Diego team teleoperated a Unitree G1 humanoid through laparoscopic gallbladder removal on two live pigs. Nature published it in July 2026. Surgeons scored clinical readiness at 2.5 out of 5.
Tesla, Figure, Boston Dynamics, Agility, Apptronik and 1X now cover the full American humanoid stack. A Chinese industry review sorts them into three routes and shows which one is already earning revenue.