China’s AI companies are running short on engineers, so they’re now scouting talent as young as 13 with camps, mentorships, and even guaranteed jobs straight out of high school.

AI data centres already strain the grid just by running. A new paper asks a darker question: what if a tenant tried to break it on purpose? Three researchers at Zhejiang University set out the idea in a preprint called Bit2Watt, accepted to a leading h…

The United States and China are reportedly preparing to hold a fresh round of talks on artificial intelligence in September, according to people familiar with the planning, in what would be the clearest sign yet that the two governments want to keep a …

Ant International, the overseas affiliate of Chinese fintech group Ant Group, has raised about $1.2 billion in a fresh equity round to fund its expansion into markets beyond its home turf. The company confirmed the raise, describing it as capital to sp…

China is considering tightening export controls on its home-grown artificial intelligence models and the chips that run them, according to the Financial Times, in a move that would push Beijing’s technology defences well beyond the raw materials and eq…

Kai-Fu Lee’s 01.ai is raising a pre-IPO round ahead of a planned Hong Kong listing in 2027, the former Google China chief told Bloomberg at the World AI Conference in Shanghai. The company is unwinding its offshore holding structure, the same prerequis…

For a year, one question has hung over China’s fast-improving AI models: what are they actually running on? Z.AI has just given part of the answer. It has built a huge data centre that uses only Chinese-made chips. The company, formerly known as Zhipu,…

One of the quiet winners of the AI boom is about to test the public markets. Zhongji Innolight, a Chinese maker of high-speed optical transceivers, has started gauging demand for a Hong Kong listing worth as much as $8bn. The Shenzhen-listed company wo…

Days after a rival Chinese lab shook Silicon Valley, Alibaba has fired back. The company previewed Qwen3.8, its most powerful model yet, and made a bold claim: it trails only one model on Earth. Alibaba unveiled the model at the World Artificial Intell…

China’s passenger car sales fell 20.2% in the first half of 2026 to 8.7 million units, and the China Passenger Car Association has lowered its full-year forecast to a 14% decline, projecting 20.4 million deliveries, down from a record 23.7 million in 2…