In the first half of 2026, China’s artificial-intelligence start-ups raised more than 300 billion yuan, a sum that already exceeds the sector’s full-year 2025 total in just six months, according to IT Juzi. The figure spans embodied intelligence, chips and every ticket above and below the 100 million yuan line, and marks a clear acceleration of the funding cycle.
Zhidx’s own tally of deals above 100 million yuan sets the geography. Globally there were 165 such events in the first half, worth about 2.7 trillion yuan. China accounted for 77 of them, the most of any country, while the United States posted 71. By value the split inverts: US deals reached roughly 2.46 trillion yuan, about 91 per cent of the global total, against China’s 126 billion yuan at 4.7 per cent.
Inside China the money clusters in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Shenzhen. Beijing led with 42 deals, but Hangzhou topped the value table on the back of DeepSeek’s single 50 billion yuan round. DeepSeek, StepFun and Moonshot were the three largest domestic raises, together worth about 90 billion yuan.
The capital is flowing two ways at once: into bedrock layers such as foundation models, compute and inference deployment, and outward into applications like video generation, AI agents, healthcare and enterprise services. On the US side, OpenAI’s two disclosed strategic investments reached about 232 billion US dollars, Anthropic added roughly 95 billion, and xAI closed a 20 billion dollar E round before its acquisition by SpaceX, three names that alone pulled the global total past 2.3 trillion yuan.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Zhidx report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.zhidx.com/p/572575.html.