Shenzhen’s Quiet Bet: Why One Lawmaker Says the City Is Built for Industrial AI
Artificial intelligence is the fourth industrial revolution, and Shenzhen is unusually well placed to turn it into indus
Artificial Intelligence
ByteDance’s Doubao Phone 2 Returns, Knocking Instead of Breaking In
In July 2026, the Nubia NaviX Ultra drew a crowd at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. The phone has a plainer name: the Doubao Phone 2. Eight months earlier, the first Doubao Phone sold 30,000 units at 3,499 yuan and briefly resold for nearly 8,000 on the second-hand market, until the frenzy lasted … Read more
The ‘Ningxia Specialty’ Inside NVIDIA’s $40,000 AI Chip
A veteran semiconductor supply-chain consultant who has tracked the industry for decades let a truth slip at a closed-door roundtable: crack open the PCB of a top-tier NVIDIA AI accelerator that speculators have pushed to $40,000 a chip, and you will find a handful of unremarkable components whose origin you cannot escape, Shizuishan, in China’s … Read more
China’s Weiyi Bets on Profitable Industrial Embodied-AI Robots Ahead of Hong Kong IPO
At WAIC on 17 July, Weiyi showed up with a range of industrial embodied-AI robots, and the pitch was that these machines are already in volume production, running in top-tier factories for over a year. No lab demos. The financials make the case. Per the prospectus, revenue rose from 221 million yuan in 2022 to … Read more
Shenzhen Unveils ’20+8′ Industrial Cluster Plan 3.0, Doubling Down on AI and Robotics
Shenzhen has released version 3.0 of its 20+8 strategic emerging-industry and future-industry plan, laying out where the city’s manufacturing economy is headed through 2030. The plan sets a headline target: by 2030, strategic emerging industries should reach 2.3 trillion yuan in added value and account for 45 per cent of GDP. The 20 covers ten … Read more
China’s AI Customer Service Is Finally Learning to Listen
Most people’s first impression of AI customer service is poor. The parcel never arrived, yet the bot loops ‘delivered.’ The question is half-asked before the system jumps topics and answers the wrong thing. Reach a human at last, and you repeat the whole story from scratch. That fatigue is universal – and it has been … Read more
China’s ‘Cheap’ AI Models Are Quietly the Expensive Ones
This past month Silicon Valley shipped GPT-5.6, Fable 5 and Grok-4.5, and China’s developer community lit up with benchmarks and debates. Yet for all the buzz, the country’s homegrown large models remain in a strange state: critically acclaimed, commercially cold. The usage-versus-revenue gap is widening. OpenRouter data for 22-28 June shows Chinese models handled 20.39 … Read more
Zhongji Innolight’s Hong Kong Debut Breaks Issue Price as AI-Infra Rally Cools
Zhongji Innolight (stock code 03308) listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 30 July. The company priced at HK$980 per share, sold 54.5 million shares and raised HK$53.4 billion; after listing fees of RMB 519 million, net proceeds came to HK$52.89 billion. With a board lot of 50 shares, a single allocation cost nearly … Read more
ByteDance Merges Feishu Into Doubao in an AI-Office Land Grab
ByteDance’s AI push just took its most concrete organisational turn yet. On 30 July, according to Phoenix Tech, the company sent an internal memo announcing that its Feishu (Lark) product team and its Doubao model product team will be merged into a new Doubao product unit, led by Doubao head Zhao Qi, with Feishu head … Read more
China’s Topstar Closes the Data Loop Behind Embodied-Robot Scale-Up
Industrial embodied intelligence just cleared a practical hurdle. Topstar, a Dongguan-based smart-manufacturing equipment maker, has built a complete industrial data-iteration loop with Wuwen Zhike, a physical-AI data-platform company — letting embodied robots iterate quickly, reuse standardized components and deploy at batch scale. Wuwen Zhike was among the first in the sector to ship a physical-AI … Read more