2026-03-09
Nearly 1,000 people lined up at Tencent's Shenzhen HQ last week to install OpenClaw. Half of all tracked OpenClaw agents now originate from China. The real story is why every major Chinese tech company rushed to support it. New analysis coming soon. Subscribe so you don't
Bloomberg
OpenClaw mania hits China: AI labs launch tools to help users deploy OpenClaw, a Shenzhen district drafts a policy encouraging free OpenClaw services, and more
Chinese software shares surged Monday after local government agencies joined tech leaders such as Tencent Holdings Ltd …
Everyone is sharing photos of crowds lining up for OpenClaw in Shenzhen. I've seen the same hype flooding my WeChat groups. My read: this looks like tech enthusiasm, but the real fuel is job market anxiety. China's employment pressure has been building since COVID. From DeepSeek
Bloomberg
OpenClaw mania hits China: AI labs launch tools to help users deploy OpenClaw, a Shenzhen district drafts a policy encouraging free OpenClaw services, and more
Chinese software shares surged Monday after local government agencies joined tech leaders such as Tencent Holdings Ltd …
2026-03-05
Alibaba pushed back on rumors today, per Yicai (China's leading financial news outlet). The Qwen team is stable. Open source remains the strategy. And the foundation model group has never carried commercial KPIs. Their mandate is to push model intelligence, not monetization [image]
Reuters
Staff memo: Alibaba says it is setting up a new task force to accelerate foundation model development, after the resignation of its Qwen AI head Lin Junyang
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (9988.HK) said on Thursday it would set up a new task force to accelerate foundation model development …
2026-03-04
Update on the Qwen shakeup. Per 36Kr, Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu held an emergency all-hands with the Qwen team this afternoon. He told the team: “I should have known about this sooner.” Alibaba's official framing: this is expansion, not contraction. But the meeting revealed real [image]
TechCrunch
Junyang Lin, a tech lead on Alibaba's Qwen team, abruptly steps down, and two other team members leave; one contributor says “I know leaving wasn't your choice”
Alibaba's Qwen AI project has lost one of its most visible technical leaders just a day after the Chinese tech giant unveiled its new Qwen 3.5 open-weight small models.
2026-01-27
StepFun just raised RMB 5 billion ($690 million) in its Series B+ round. This is the largest single fundraising in China's foundation model over the past 12 months. What stands out: the investor lineup is dominated by local state-backed funds from Shanghai, Wuxi, and other
DealStreetAsia
StepFun, a Chinese AI startup that develops LLMs and has partnered with automaker Geely and smartphone brands like Oppo and Honor, raised a ~$717M Series B+
2026-01-15
Qwen APP hit 100 million monthly active users two months after launch. That's fast scaling. [image]
Bloomberg
Alibaba links Qwen to its online shopping and travel services, including Taobao, Alipay, Fliggy, and Amap, aiming to build a one-stop AI app for its 100M users
2026-01-02
Moonshot AI CEO revealed in an internal memo that the company closed $500M Series C at $4.3B valuation, led by IDG with Alibaba and Tencent oversubscribing. Per the memo: $1.4B cash on hand. Kimi's global paid users up 170% month-over-month. Overseas API revenue jumped 4x after launching K2 Thinking model.
South China Morning Post
Report: China-based Moonshot AI, which makes Kimi AI models, raised a $500M Series C at a $4.3B valuation led by IDG Capital; Alibaba and Tencent also invested
Iris Deng / South China Morning Post :
2025-12-16
China approved its first L3 autonomous vehicles from Changan and Arcfox. The details matter more than the headline. These cars aren't going to consumers. They're limited to specific road segments in Chongqing and Beijing, operated by fleet companies. Changan's system caps at 50 [image]
Reuters
China approves two Level 3 autonomous cars from state-owned Changan Auto and BAIC Motor, the first such approvals; the cars can drive in Chongqing and Beijing
China's industry regulator on Monday approved two Chinese cars with level-3 autonomous driving capabilities …
2025-11-27
Alibaba launched AI glasses today. Everyone's talking specs. Missing the point. Qwen in glasses connects to Alipay, Taobao, Amap, Fliggy. Shop, navigate, pay through voice and vision. This isn't hardware. It's ecosystem lock-in extending into physical space. Chinese AI [image]
Bloomberg
Alibaba starts selling Quark S1, its first smart glasses powered by its Qwen AI models, for ~$537 in China, and plans to release international versions in 2026
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. began sales of its first smart glasses powered by its Qwen AI models, marking a rare foray into consumer hardware.
2025-11-14
Baidu's World Conference today was all about applications. The new model launch? That came last. ERNIE 5.0 dropped with 2.4 trillion parameters using a sparse MoE architecture. Only 3% of parameters activate per inference, though Baidu hasn't disclosed the exact expert count.
VentureBeat
Baidu unveils Ernie 5.0, an AI model to process and generate text, images, audio, and video, claiming it beats GPT-5-High and Gemini 2.5 Pro on some benchmarks
our latest natively omni-modal foundational model. It excels in omni-modal understanding, creative writing, instruction following, and more. We will continue investing in and devel...
2025-09-24
Alibaba Cloud AI metrics: 5x computing power growth, 4x storage growth year-over-year. Half of China's major foundation model companies and Fortune 500 firms using GenAI are on their platform. Scale matters in the AI race. [image]
Bloomberg
Alibaba's Hong Kong-listed shares hit a nearly four-year high after CEO Eddie Wu announced plans to increase AI spending beyond the $53B target over three years
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s shares surged to their highest in nearly four years after revealing plans to ramp up AI spending past …