#China

AIAlibaba CEO Eddie Wu said on September 22 that strong AI demand is driving infrastructure investment, targeting over 20GW of global cloud data-center capacity by 2032. T-Head unveiled the Zhenwu V900, claiming 3× the compute performance of the M890 and support for clusters of up to 500,000 accelerator cards. Servers using V900 chips are scheduled to launch in Q1 2027.

AITencent Hunyuan says it shrank the 770B-parameter Hy4 preview from roughly 1.5TB to 214 GiB while keeping the parameter count unchanged. The quoted Zhihu post by a Tencent Hunyuan quantization team member describes the method: a 1.25-bit sparse ternary encoding, mixed precision across expert layers, and STQ1_0 CUDA kernels in llama.cpp. The author reports nearly unchanged MRCR retrieval and a small decline in math.

Why it matters: The quoted Zhihu post explains how Hy4 preview's weights were quantized and kept usable at inference, a concrete engineering case for compressing large MoE models.

AIXiaomi says MiMo-V2.6 keeps API pricing unchanged from V2.5 for both the Pro and Flash models while adding more intelligence. It claims MiMo-V2.6-Pro sets a new price-performance record among Chinese models, with comparable intelligence costing about 1/20 to 1/60 of leading international models.

AINathan Lambert argues that Chinese open-weight models now lead American ones on benchmarks, Hugging Face downloads, and OpenRouter usage. He estimates the gap to the American closed frontier at 2 to 5 months for Chinese open models and 6 to 9 months for American open models. The piece also reports that Chinese open-weight models were mentioned in over 40% of arXiv papers he scanned, compared with 30% for American models.

AIAridge has signed a cooperation agreement with Ras Al Khaimah to set up a regulatory sandbox for advanced air mobility in the UAE, overseen by the UAE General Civil Aviation Authority. The program will test its Land Aircraft Carrier in desert conditions and plans a demonstration route between Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah. Regulatory approval for commercial passenger eVTOL flights remains pending.

AIswyx announced a Latent Space podcast episode featuring Jev, subscribable on Apple and YouTube, and thanked guests Allen Park and Ke. A quoted post from @CompleteSkeptic claims Jev is a frontier model with 20-200x faster speed and 40-400x lower cost, but this post itself adds no verified details.

AIModelScope has added inference and training support for Qwen-Image-2.1 on its Civision platform. The feature is currently available on the CN site, with international support promised as coming soon.

AIExcellent feature article by Nikkei on Heiga Zen (@heiga_zen), who leads Google DeepMind Tokyo. I miss the days when Heiga and I founded the Google Brain Tokyo team in 2018. Back then, we were holding late-night meetings across difficult time zones, working hard to establish a presence for Japanese AI research. Now he leads GDM Tokyo, and I've founded Sakana AI. I'm truly glad to see Tokyo's AI ecosystem grow this large!

AIStepFun says it is focusing Step 5 Preview on finance, judging it on verifying reliable information, reconciling conflicting reports, stating assumptions, and producing consistent, reproducible valuations. The post says the model is evaluated on FinStepBench, covering LiveSearch, CorporateValuation, and DeepResearch, and on FrontierFinance across six investment use cases.

AIStepFun has released Step 5 Preview, a flagship model for agentic work that it says delivers frontier-level performance in software engineering and professional knowledge work, with particular strength in finance. The model is a 600B total, 27B active mixture-of-experts design with a 1M context window and vision support. StepFun says it offers substantially lower task cost at comparable intelligence, and open weights are scheduled for October 15.

AIHuawei unveiled the Atlas 960E superpod, which links up to 4,096 NPUs using near-packaged optics (NPO) and claims eight exaflops at FP8 precision and up to one petabyte of high-bandwidth memory. Its Hi-ONE engine provides 7.2 terabits per second of transmission capacity, and Huawei says 5,500 engines replace 48,000 conventional 800G optical modules, cutting power consumption by more than 550 kilowatts. Huawei has proposed its NPO implementation agreement to the Optical Internetworking Forum, though it has not yet become a standard.

AIBaidu's Apollo Go robotaxi is conducting fully driverless testing on Hong Kong's roads. The post invites viewers to see the vehicles in action but gives no further details on scale, timing, or partners.

AIAt HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Huawei announced the Ascend 960 SuperPoD, which supports up to 4,096 NPU cards and uses NPO technology. According to Huawei, Hi-ONE NPO units can replace 48,000 800G optical modules with about 5,500 units, reducing power consumption by more than 550kW, and system availability will reach 99.8%.

AIFormer DeepSeek kernel engineer Shengyu Liu argues that AI industrializing software production could reduce programming to a recreational craft and erode students' engineering skills. His central concern is less whether AI can outthink humans than whether access to it stays widespread or gets concentrated in a few corporations. The post, cited by X.PIN, contrasts this with Western warnings about AI escaping human control.

AIHiDream.ai launched vivago R1, a content creation agent, globally, with a domestic version upgrade. The company says R1 can output five-minute high-quality videos through agent planning, with a claimed 85% usable-output rate and support for multi-round extensions. It also released HiDream-O1-Video-1.0, a native omni-modal video model supporting single shots of 5 to 20 seconds at 1080p.

AIu guys r drinking too much! (this is not an ad for 农夫山泉)

AIWaymo, Nihon Kotsu and GO have signed an agreement to prepare a commercial launch of a fully autonomous ride-hailing service in Tokyo in 2027. The post links to a Waymo blog post with more details on the partnership.

AIBaidu's second AI, Evolving episode compares how companies in China and other markets build AI agents for the workday. It uses DuMate as a case study of what agents need to earn user trust and help individuals and teams do more.

AIBaidu's Miaoda no-code platform has upgraded with enhanced AI agents for design, app generation, and testing. The update adds enterprise tools for private deployment and collaboration, plus a marketplace linking businesses with creators for templates and custom development. Baidu says Miaoda has served over 40M users and enabled 5M business apps.

AIJohn Schulman posted that Anthropic's approach to Elon Musk would be nice to see applied with China. The post gives no detail on what that approach involves.

AIShanghai AI Lab's InternLM team released Intern-S2-397B, a multimodal foundation model for scientific intelligence and long-horizon agents. The model uses visual pre-training on raw scientific literature pages, multi-task reinforcement learning across more than 20 scientific domains, and agentic reinforcement learning in sandboxed environments.

AIDwarkesh Patel announced a new episode featuring John Schulman, Chris O'Neill, and Beren Millidge, three AI researchers from openish companies. The discussion covers the case against recursive self-improvement, drivers of Chinese labs' progress, training of automated AI researchers, long-horizon RL, the sim-to-real gap, and the role of data and RL in recent progress.

AIBAAI introduced AREX, a research agent built on a 122B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 10B active parameters. It drafts candidate answers, checks each constraint, and revisits unresolved points rather than running one long search. The post says AREX performs on hard search benchmarks comparable to GPT-5.4.

AINathan Lambert has compiled a reading list of open-model writing covering why labs release open weights, the open-versus-closed debate, and US-China competition, last updated 15 September 2026. The list includes pieces on open-model economics, safety and marginal-risk research, and recent Chinese releases such as Kimi K3 and GLM-5.2. It also cites lawmaker inquiries into Western companies' use of Chinese models.

AITencent Hunyuan posted that much more AI is coming, with no specific model, date, or feature named. The post follows an Ivan Fioravanti visit to Tencent's Beijing headquarters, where he praised the team and said Hy4 Preview is only the tip of the iceberg.

AIDeepSeek says it will work with the open-source community on inference support for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and explore more deployment options. The company is inviting organizations planning large-scale deployments with 2,000 GPUs and a storage cluster to get in touch. The model and a technical report are published on Hugging Face.

AIDeepSeek says its more efficient V4.1-Flash architecture lets it serve more users at lower cost and pass the savings on through lower API prices. Peak/off-peak pricing continues, with off-peak rates at 50% of peak rates. The new pricing takes effect at 04:00 UTC on September 10, 2026.

AIDeepSeek says its V4.1-Flash model needs only 1/4 the HBM and 1/8 the SSD storage for its KV cache compared with the previous generation. Because cache-hit charges often make up a large share of agent costs, the company says the compressed cache significantly reduces those costs.

AIAt Arm Everywhere China on September 8, 2026, Arm launched products spanning data center CPUs, mobile compute subsystems, and robotics platforms. The article says CSS for Mobile 2 integrates CPU, GPU, and neural accelerator for agent AI on phones, and Arm's Neoverse CSS N4 and AGI CPU target agent sandboxes in data centers. It also reports that Arm's Total Design ecosystem now covers over 80 partners for physical AI.

AIMistral announced a €3 billion Series D round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion, led by Samsung Electronics with co-leads Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity. The company says the funding will expand frontier research, compute capacity, infrastructure, and international growth, and that it now operates in 20 countries with 125+ enterprise customers including Airbus, ASML, and HSBC.

Why it matters: The round shows how a company frames sovereign, open-weight AI as a full stack spanning models, infrastructure, compute, and products, which is useful context for European enterprise AI strategy.

AIBaidu has launched AI, Evolving, a new podcast series, with its first episode examining AI's growing role in scientific discovery through Famou's work on pine wilt disease. The post frames this as part of a broader trend in which AI takes on more of the research process itself. It asks whether research agents could become part of the infrastructure of discovery.

AIBAAI and Peking University researchers released official weights for ConsiSpace, a geometry-consistent multimodal framework for spatial reasoning in long-form visual observations. The model is described in the paper "ConsiSpace: Learning Geometric Consistency Matters for Video Spatial Reasoning" (arXiv:2607.17599).

AIZhipu (Z.ai) reported first-half 2026 revenue of US$142 million, up nearly 400% year on year, driven mainly by its open platform and API business. As of end-August 2026, ARR reached US$1.6 billion, and gross margin for the platform and API business rose from negative 0.4% to 24.6%. The company also said its platform had over 7.4 million registered users and that GLM-5.3's gains came partly from a several-dozen-fold expansion in data environments.

AIBaidu and IFAW have launched AI Guardian, a platform powered by ERNIE models that builds on a collaboration since 2020 that has helped remove more than 18,000 listings linked to the illegal wildlife trade. The platform aims to make this wildlife protection technology more accessible, and users can sign in through ai4wcp.com to help protect wildlife.

AIBAAI and Hao Tang's team at Peking University's School of Computer Science released GaussianMind, an audio-language model built on RoboBrain and OpenMOSS Audio. The model is available on Hugging Face and loads through custom Transformers code with trust_remote_code=True.

AIBaidu's latest AI Pulse highlights how its product portfolio, including DuMate, GenFlow, MeDo, and ERNIE Assistant, is built to take AI work from request to finished result. The post also notes that Baidu has become a dual-primary listed company and that its Apollo Go robotaxi service has expanded in Dubai and Hong Kong.

AIShanghai AI Lab congratulates its Director and Chief Scientist Prof. Bowen Zhou, who was named to TIME's 2026 TIME100 AI "Thinkers" list. The lab says his vision drives its work on models for scientific discovery and on AI safety and reliability.

AITencent Hunyuan shared a post praising the result of an animation based on the Qingming Shanghe Tu, without giving further details. The quoted post says the creator built the animation with Tencent's Hy4 preview, and claims that from the same prompt it outperformed GLM5.3-flash.

AIHelical Fusion CTO Wei Xishuo told the NFEC2026 AI-for-fusion forum that the company uses an autoencoder to compress hundreds of stellarator shape parameters into three. The company says this lets it predict zonal flow residuals and turbulent transport from more than 15,000 global simulations and generate new configurations with up to 100x better confinement in simulation.