Yuanchuan Micro, founded by a 22-year Huawei veteran, has closed a nine-figure yuan Pre-A round led by IDG Capital to build LPU-class inference chips for the Agent era.
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.
In 2025, Hello (the ride-hailing and bike-sharing platform) formed Zaofu Intelligent with Ant Group and CATL and entered robotaxis with an ambitious target: deploy 10,000 robotaxis by 2027. By then, Pony.ai had already reached single-city profitability, WeRide and Apollo Go were expanding abroad, and Waymo was still growing its fleet. A 2025 entrant looked late. … Read more
Momenta listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 8 July 2026, raising HK$5.89 billion in its initial public offering. Fourteen cornerstone investors, including Singapore’s GIC, Fidelity, Mercedes-Benz and BYD, took up nearly half the shares on offer, an unusual line-up that put a German luxury brand, a Chinese EV leader and a sovereign fund … Read more
World models take the stage at WAIC World-model fever reached WAIC 2026, where forums, booths and launches treated it as the soul of the event, because the year of embodied deployment demands a model that understands the physical world. On 19 July, Kunlun Wanwei’s forum answered the plain technical question: how does a world model … Read more