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
China has finally fixed a date. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has opened public consultation on the approval draft of a mandatory national standard covering safety requirements for automated driving systems. It replaces a recommended standard with a legal floor for L3 and L4, and it is scheduled to take effect on 1 … 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
YuanChuan Micro’s LPU inference chip. Source: LeiPhone Before Groq’s LPU became famous on the back of Nvidia’s spotlight, Yang Bin, founder and CEO of YuanChuan Micro, had already been sketching an inference chip of his own. LeiPhone has learned exclusively that LPU startup YuanChuan Micro has closed a Pre-A round of several hundred million yuan. … Read more
Image related to the story. Source: LeiPhone A single piece of news lit up both the AI and chip worlds yesterday: Silicon Valley startup Etched has closed $800 million in cumulative funding, pushed its valuation to $5 billion, and landed a $1 billion chip order. The company has been quiet. Founded in 2022 by three … Read more
For most of the past decade, large buyers operated with a dependable lever: if a Chinese supplier would not meet their terms, they could pivot to a Chinese-made alternative anyway, since domestic capacity was abundant and hungry. The threat disciplined pricing on both sides, and almost always against the local supplier. ChangXin’s refusal inverts that … Read more
Lidar was once the most contested sensor in autonomous driving. Supporters argued it supplies 3D information cameras cannot, a safety redundancy high-level driver assistance cannot do without. Opponents, led by Tesla, called it expensive, bulky and transitional. Yet since 2025, as advanced driver assistance spread, lidar has not exited, it has entered mass production, and … Read more
Why helium is the acute risk In front-end processing, steps including cleaning, film deposition, lithography, dry etching and inspection repeat 50 to 100 times or more per silicon wafer, sometimes over 1,000 steps in total. Helium and naphtha are the two materials a fab cannot do without. In dry etching, intense heat passes from plasma … Read more
What the evaluation found The panel concluded the project fills a core gap in China’s domestic multi-modal AI databases and offers a new paradigm for modernising basic-software architecture and fusing AI with the data layer. Targeting the strategic need for local substitution in critical fields, it tackles entrenched industry problems: rigid sharding in distributed databases, … Read more
A Huawei lifer’s bet Founder and CEO Yang Bin spent more than two decades at Huawei, building the company’s processor team from scratch in the US and later leading wireless baseband algorithms and chip work, with long experience in large-scale hardware scheduling and data architecture. He sums up entrepreneurship as ‘the realisation of everything you … Read more