World News by Wild Rose

China’s top state research body has put artificial intelligence and other frontier technologies at the heart of its new five-year plan, unveiled on Monday, as global competition in science and technology heats up. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, China’s highest academic institution, laid out a detailed blueprint for research and technology development aligned with the country’s 15th five-year plan covering 2026 to 2030. The plan focuses on innovation in areas including artificial intelligence...

Chinese chip foundry CanSemi Technology’s Shenzhen initial public offering (IPO) is emerging as one of mainland China’s most sought-after tech listings this year, as investors bet on its push into silicon photonics and its role in domestic artificial intelligence infrastructure. The Guangzhou-based company’s retail tranche was oversubscribed by more than 2,300 times after clawback, according to a stock exchange filing late on Sunday, as investors scrambled for a piece of the domestic...

ByteDance accounts for roughly one-fifth of China’s delivered data centre capacity, making the TikTok owner the country’s largest tenant and a main driver of its artificial intelligence buildout, according to new estimates by research firm SemiAnalysis. The estimate comes from the firm’s tracking of more than 1,000 facilities in China operated by over 60 companies. ByteDance rents nearly all of its data centre footprint, SemiAnalysis said. Its AI products include Doubao, an assistant that...

Under the shadow of Beijing’s single-minded focus on artificial intelligence, China’s consumer stocks are trapped in a lost decade.

The BBC is in Inner Mongolia where dozen of Chinese data centres are being constructed, as the country aims to lead the world in artificial intelligence.

As President Xi Jinping prepares to travel to the United States to meet his American counterpart Donald Trump, attention is turning to the group of business leaders who could join him. The South China Morning Post previously reported that executives from electric vehicle maker BYD, smart manufacturing giant Xiaomi and battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited were likely to accompany Xi on the trip – though Beijing has yet to officially confirm the delegation. What has raised...

China’s top internet watchdog has drafted new rules to regulate how social platforms and game developers should protect minors, including a ban on offering “virtual intimacy services” to those under 18 as artificial intelligence-powered companions gain traction. The rules, titled “Ensuring minors’ safe and healthy use of the internet”, would ban online platforms from providing “virtual relatives or companions”, and prohibit them from offering services that “induce minors to become addicted or...

Chinese chipmaker Hygon Information Technology is set to release a new chip targeting physical-world applications including robotics, expanding from its current focus on data centres, according to Chinese media reports and company information. The product launch, slated for Tuesday, marks Hygon’s move into a new chip category powering machines that interact directly with their environments, as physical artificial intelligence becomes increasingly important. The new chip, an iteration of the...

Less than a week before Chinese leader Xi Jinping travels to the US to meet President Donald Trump, AI has taken center stage in the bilateral relationship. In some ways the rivalry is straightforward. Most benchmarks show American models have a lead in performance that Washington very much wants to maintain, for military and economic reasons. Anja Manuel, Aspen Strategy Group Executive Director joins to discuss the upcoming meeting between the two leaders as well as what to expect from the UN General Assembly next week. (Source: Bloomberg)

Alibaba Group Holding’s research arm, Damo Academy, has open-sourced an artificial intelligence model capable of identifying nearly 150 abdominal conditions – including cancers – by reading computed tomography (CT) scans, marking the latest step in the firm’s growing medical AI efforts. The vision-language model, called Damo Radar, was designed to analyse contrast-enhanced CT scans covering 18 abdominal organs and identify a broad range of diseases and other abnormalities, such as malignant...

Ant International, the overseas affiliate of China’s Ant Group, is executing an artificial intelligence overhaul across its entire suite of global financial services, introducing AI agents designed to help manage payments, foreign exchange and treasury operations. Described by the company as its largest-ever product upgrade, the initiative embeds AI-native solutions across all platforms: cross-border payment network Alipay+, merchant services provider Antom, account and treasury platform...

China is seeing a fresh fundraising boom for AI drug developers, with start-ups including a ByteDance spin-off raising hundreds of millions of dollars this week as investors rush to back domestic challengers to Anthropic and Isomorphic Labs. Anew Labs, a Shanghai-based AI drug discovery firm that was formerly a unit of Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has raised US$290 million at a valuation of US$1.5 billion, according to an informed source. Investors included prominent venture capital firms such...

A 13-year-old boy from eastern China has garnered significant attention online for his ability to leverage artificial intelligence and programming to solve everyday challenges. Yang Xizhe, a junior secondary school student from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, stands at an impressive 1.9 metres tall and has amassed a following of over 500,000 on mainland social media platforms. Growing up in a city celebrated for its vibrant technology ecosystem, he identifies as an “AI native.” Yang believes that...

President Xi Jinping has reiterated calls for China to make its supply chains more resilient and self-sufficient while accelerating the creation of a modern industrial system underpinned by advanced manufacturing. Xi’s latest directives, issued at a national conference on advanced manufacturing in Beijing on Wednesday and Thursday, were said to be aimed at strengthening the Chinese economy, the state-run Xinhua reported. Xi’s push this week echoed Beijing’s previous statements and came as the...

China said it can now predict weather 10 days in advance at a cutting-edge resolution of 5km (3.1 miles), finer than most major systems in routine use around the world. The advance was achieved by a Chinese-developed weather forecasting model running on Sugon 8,000, a massive home-grown computing system built entirely with domestically made AI chips. Most major global forecasting systems have resolutions of roughly 5km to 10km, according to the China Meteorological Administration and...

China’s contributions and leadership were of considerable value to the revision of new International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards for artificial intelligence, intelligent transport systems and cybersecurity, according to the global body. The ISO made the comments on Wednesday as it released ISO 9001:2026, which is the first major revision to ISO 9001 – an international benchmark for quality management – in a decade, it added. ISO Secretary-General Sergio Mujica told the South...

An intensifying tech race with the United States, along with Beijing’s drive for technological self-reliance, has led China’s leaders to place greater significance and urgency on breakthroughs in sectors ranging from artificial intelligence to integrated circuits and chips in its latest five-year plan for electronics and information technology. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planning agency, on Tuesday...

When generative artificial intelligence first swept through China’s technology sector, workers faced a clear directive from management: use AI and use it often. Consuming vast numbers of AI tokens – the basic unit of computing power needed to process text or write code – became a badge of honour, with companies often viewing a high token count as a sign that employees were productive and taking initiative. But those computing allowances are now being sharply rolled back as China’s leading...

Researchers from China’s leading universities and tech giants are setting their sights on a crucial new front in the AI race with the US: developing systems capable of building better versions of themselves without human intervention. In a joint paper published on Thursday, researchers from ByteDance, Tsinghua University and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, among others, outlined a five-stage road map for recursive self-improvement (RSI). The study, titled “The Last AI Built by...

It follows the Anthropic CEO 's calls for a slowdown in AI development, in a way that China doesn't pull ahead.

President Xi Jinping promoted China’s vision for artificial intelligence (AI) at the annual Brics summit, seeking to win support from the Global South amid tech competition with the US. China would spearhead development of an AI Brics “community”, support cooperation in developing large language models and offer training, Xi said on Sunday in New Delhi. The previous day, he invited Brics nations to join the newly formed World AI Cooperation Organisation. Brics countries must “strengthen...

“Bloomberg: The China Show” is your definitive source for news and analysis on the world's second-biggest economy. From politics and policy to tech and trends, Yvonne Man and David Ingles give global investors unique insight, delivering in-depth discussions with the newsmakers who matter. (Source: Bloomberg)

Bloomberg's Yvonne Man speaks with Artificial Analysis's Micah Hill-Smith about the AI race, China's role in it, and the growing debate over model safety. (Source: Bloomberg)

China’s top intelligence official has warned of rising national security risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI), calling for robust risk prevention frameworks and stronger global governance of the emerging technology. The call from Chen Yixin, China’s state security minister, comes as Beijing seeks to play a leading role in global AI governance while criticising US restrictions. At the Brics summit in India over the weekend, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed an AI-powered initiative to...

Z.ai, the Chinese artificial intelligence model developer listed in Hong Kong, is seeking to raise about HK$15.7 billion (US$2 billion) through a placement of roughly 21.97 million new H shares at HK$714 apiece, according to a company filing on Sunday. The company also announced a 20.14 billion yuan (US$3 billion) convertible-bond sale, according to its filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange. Z.ai, also known as Zhipu AI, closed at HK$793 on Friday, down 73 per cent from its intraday high of...

Chinese researchers have developed a way to make an emerging type of memory chip much more durable, potentially overcoming a critical reliability barrier to its use in high-performance computing and future artificial intelligence systems as the AI boom drives demand for more advanced semiconductors. The team demonstrated more than 10 billion writing cycles in wurtzite ferroelectrics, a class of materials that can switch between two electric states to store data. The result was roughly 100 times...

Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged on Sunday to help Brics countries develop and apply open-source large language models and build smart manufacturing factories. Speaking at the second day of the Brics summit in New Delhi, he identified these as two key initiatives to promote economic growth and technological development in the Global South. Xi also said Beijing would offer to train young talent from other member states in advanced technology and innovation, according to state news agency...

Artificial intelligence agents are increasingly taking the wheel in designing China’s next-generation semiconductors, as Beijing and domestic technology firms accelerate efforts to integrate AI into chip design software to bolster national self-sufficiency. Empyrean Technology, China’s top maker of electronic design automation (EDA) tools, has been accelerating the chip design process by using AI-optimised algorithms and agentic tools, according to company chairman Liu Weiping. By applying an AI...

Enflame Technology, one of the major challengers to Nvidia in China, saw its share price surge 188 per cent in its Shanghai trading debut on Friday, giving the Tencent Holdings-backed artificial intelligence chipmaker a market capitalisation of 176.4 billion yuan (US$26.3 million). The Shanghai-based company opened at 410 yuan, up from its issue price of 142.18 yuan. The performance reflects continued investor appetite for domestic AI chip champions, with Enflame being the last of China’s “four...

The response comes after three US agencies accused Chinese AI companies of exploiting American AI models.