eChina.news

Innovation

Moonshot AI pushes China closer to US in frontier tech

Moonshot AI halted new subscriptions for Kimi K3 after a flood of interest, underscoring how the model’s release last week has upended global assessments of China’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. “Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity,” Beijing-based Moonshot AI said in a statement posted on X on Sunday. The company’s computer chips “are feeling it.” Moonshot last week unveiled Kimi K3, an open-weight AI model that the company says...

July 20, 2026

Innovation

Kimi K3 developer suspends new subscriptions amid compute constraints

Chinese start-up pauses Kimi K3 subscriptions due to surging demand and compute shortages, highlighting the country’s AI chip challenges Chinese start-up Moonshot AI has suspended new subscriptions for its groundbreaking new model Kimi K3 as surging demand squeezes its computing power, underscoring the challenges Chinese AI labs face in serving their products to global users. “Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity,” Beijing-based Moonshot AI said in a statement posted on X on Sunday. “Our GPUs [graphics processing units] are feeling it.” It had “temporarily paused new subscriptions”, adding that existing subscribers were not affected. “We’re adding capacity as fast as we can and will reopen new subscription spots in batches,” said the company. Moonshot is currently serving the massive K3 model through a cloud application programming interface, and plans to release the model’s weights by July 27, which would make it the world’s largest open-weight frontier model so far. Chinese AI labs continue to face computing power shortages as the country’s chip industry strives to catch up under US export control measures, which have restricted access to advanced chips and chipmaking equipment.

July 20, 2026

Innovation

Amazon Web Services bets on ‘one-person unicorns’ with new accelerator for Chinese founders

AWS launches 'From Idea to Frontier' programme offering up to US$100,000 in AWS credits, mentorship and a shot at the re:Invent stage in Las Vegas Scheme targets Chinese solo founders and indie developers as AI slashes the time and headcount needed to build a global company [The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] The top five teams will be showcased at AWS re:Invent, the cloud giant's annual conference in Las Vegas, which runs from November 30 to December 4 this year and draws tens of thousands of developers and technology executives. "In the AI era, startups don't have years — they have six to 12 months to win," the company said in its programme materials, adding that AI tools and cloud infrastructure could compress the timeline for shipping a minimum viable product "from three years down to three months". The initiative reflects a broader shift in China's startup landscape. According to a 2026 industry white paper on one-person companies cited in AWS promotional materials, the mainland is now home to some 16 million such firms, accounting for 27.4 per cent of all enterprises — roughly one in every three newly registered businesses.

July 19, 2026

Innovation

Changzhou says it is building China’s first city-level clean-power AI token factory

Project is expected to churn out 60 trillion tokens a year, driving the country’s AI clean-power ambitions forward The city in the eastern Jiangsu province did not provide a timeline for completion of the initiative. The facility would connect directly to renewable energy plants under a national policy that allowed green power to bypass public grids, the statement said. The design aims to optimise power usage, with token output expected to rise 62.5 per cent using the same computing power resources, significantly enhancing token supply efficiency and economic viability. The agreement, signed on Saturday, involves seven parties including Alibaba Cloud and Wangsu Science and Technology, a provider of information infrastructure platform services. Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post.

July 19, 2026

Innovation

Chinese chip start-up Biren bets on light-based ‘supernodes’ to match Nvidia

The firm uses near-packaged optics to bypass traditional architecture limits and scale more than 1,000 processor cards across a cluster Chinese semiconductor design firm Biren Technology has unveiled its next-generation “supernode” solutions – systems designed to link thousands of AI chips across a single cluster – by using optical data transmission to bypass current hardware limits. The launch underscores how these highly connected server systems have become one of the latest battlegrounds for AI infrastructure companies. The industry is currently racing to scale up raw computing power as artificial intelligence models advance to trillions of parameters and AI agent applications gain widespread adoption. To break through that ceiling, Biren is betting on a distributed, decoupled supernode architecture and near-packaged optics (NPO), which integrates optical fibres closer to chips to boost data speeds. The layout could allow Biren to scale up to 1,024 cards across a cluster. “Optical interconnect has become an inevitable choice to break through this bottleneck,” Ding said. Shanghai-based Biren is only the latest domestic player to announce progress in addressing infrastructure limitations.

July 18, 2026

Innovation

Xi Jinping’s keynote speech at the World AI Conference

This speech was translated from Chinese into English using Alibaba’s Qwen3.7-Plus, then checked and tweaked for accuracy by a South China Morning Post journalist. It is for reference only, and is not the official English version of the original Chinese document. Alibaba owns the SCMP.

July 17, 2026

Innovation

Xi Jinping warns against creating ‘new historical injustices’ in AI era

Chinese leader’s presence at World AI Conference signals Beijing’s push to elevate AI from tech priority to pillar of geopolitical strategy President Xi Jinping warned against creating “new historical injustices” in the era of artificial intelligence on Friday, calling for greater support for the technology’s use and adoption in the Global South and a more open, inclusive approach to AI development. Xi also urged countries to strengthen risk awareness and ensure that AI is “secure and controllable”, while taking aim at the growing securitisation of the technology, at the opening ceremony of China’s largest annual event for the AI industry. “We should jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI or placing one country’s security over that of others,” he said. The Chinese leader’s message also positioned Beijing as an advocate of a more open approach to AI development, at a time when access to advanced technologies is increasingly constrained by export controls and corporate blacklists.

July 17, 2026

Innovation

Chinese Nvidia alternatives project massive sales as AI chip demand surges

Moore Threads and Hygon are capitalising on surging demand for AI computing power as they race to fill the void left by Washington’s export controls Chinese chip designers Moore Threads Technology and Hygon Information Technology – both positioning themselves as home-grown alternatives to Nvidia – have projected double- to triple-digit revenue growth for the first half of the year, fuelled by surging domestic demand for AI computing power. The forecasts underscore strong domestic appetite for computing infrastructure amid a global race for dominance in artificial intelligence. The company also said that its flagship GPU, MTT S5000, had achieved market-leading performance. Moore Threads stated the chip was now in mass production and asserted that its computing efficiency matched top international alternatives.

July 17, 2026

Innovation

China’s BrainCo unveils mind-to-robot platform at World AI Conference

Hangzhou-based firm says users can control robots using only their thoughts via EEG headsets, marking a leap in embodied AI tech It comes as global technology firms are racing to develop powerful embodied AI systems, where artificial intelligence is integrated into physical machines, such as robots, which would allow them to perceive, reason and interact with the physical world. According to BrainCo, its platform works by capturing brain signals via an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset worn by the user. AI-based algorithms then decode these neural signals to identify the user’s intentions, translating them directly into robotic actions. The platform is compatible with a wide range of third-party hardware, including humanoid robots, robotic arms and robotic dogs, the company said. For example, a robotic arm can be directed to grasp a cup and pick up an apple based solely on brain signals.

July 17, 2026

Innovation

Moonshot AI unveils world’s largest open-source AI model as China narrows gap with US rivals

Kimi K3 is designed for long-horizon coding, knowledge work and reasoning tasks, according to a blog post by Moonshot AI Chinese start-up Moonshot AI has launched the world’s largest open-source artificial intelligence model, claiming to outperform leading US systems from Anthropic and OpenAI in some capabilities, as domestic developers race to challenge American dominance. Parameters, a machine-learning term, measure the complexity of AI systems during training, with a higher figure generally indicating a stronger model. K3 was designed for long-horizon coding, knowledge work and reasoning tasks, the company said in a blog post. K3 outperformed Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol – two of the most advanced AI systems from US labs – on a few evaluations, including Program Bench and SWE Marathon, according to self-reported benchmark results by the company.

July 17, 2026

Innovation

Top takeaways from Xi Jinping’s opening address at the World AI Conference in Shanghai

Chinese President Xi Jinping has made a landmark speech at the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, delivering his first-ever keynote address at the country’s premier artificial intelligence event. Xi’s speech came just moments after his US counterpart, Donald Trump, delivered an unprecedented attack against Beijing during a prime-time national broadcast, accusing China of orchestrating the “largest compromise of election data in history”. The dueling addresses are set to further fuel...

July 17, 2026

Innovation

From humanoids to Huawei: what to watch as Xi attends China’s WAIC amid US AI rivalry

Gathering will showcase Beijing’s push to compete across the full AI stack, from models and chips to robots, consumer devices The World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai comes amid an intensifying technology rivalry with the US, whose restrictions continue to constrain China’s access to advanced computing chips. Beijing has responded by making technological self-reliance a national priority and accelerating the development of domestic alternatives across hardware and software. China has also rejected criticism that its promotion of open-source AI models overseas amounts to a “trap”. Responding on Thursday to a question citing such claims in Western media, foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said Beijing opposed drawing ideological lines and imposing technological blockades. He said China would use WAIC to promote exchanges and consensus, while seeking to ensure that the benefits of AI development reached more developing countries. This year’s WAIC is likely to be read as a test of how far China has progressed towards turning advances in models into a broader industrial ecosystem, as well as how it seeks to shape global rules through academic engagement, safety standards, governance frameworks and international collaboration.

July 17, 2026