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
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
In a park in May 2022, a boundary-free robotic mower prototype ran back and forth on the lawn. It ran well. Qin Ling, who had just joined the team, took the mower as his first project. The team formed in late 2021, core members in place by early 2022, and in about five months built … Read more
Estun has topped China’s industrial-robot shipment rankings again, and this time crossed a threshold no domestic brand had reached: more than 10,000 robots delivered in a single quarter. According to MIR DATABANK, in the first half of 2026 Estun again led all brands in China’s industrial-robot shipments. In the second quarter it became the first … Read more
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 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
The humanoid-robot sector has entered its capital-realisation phase. AgiBot has confirmed it has launched the process for a Hong Kong listing, and it timed the announcement to land on the very day the exchange’s new listing rules took effect. The message was not a surprise. Rumours of an IPO have circulated for half a year. … Read more
A clear regulatory signal is circulating in China’s auto industry: the external ‘blue light’ that marks a car’s assisted-driving system as active will be banned on all passenger cars, because it fails the national standard GB4785 on the installation of exterior lighting and light-signal devices. The blue light is a recent add-on from many new-force … Read more
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
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