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Alice Ye

Senior editor with 15 years in news and financial media. Covers China's AI, electric vehicles, and robotics, with a focus on industry trends, technological innovation, and capital markets.

China EVs Shatter CATL's Battery Monopoly

Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers are aggressively dismantling Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd.'s (CATL) supply chain monopoly to salvage deteriorating profit margins. The structural shift in the world’s largest EV market reached a psychological inflection point on September 16, 2026, when CATL’s A-shares dipped below the

Alibaba’s Amap Challenges Google Earth With a Predictive 3D World Model

Amap, Alibaba Group's mapping arm, launched what it claims is the world's first fully multimodal, predictive 3D-native urban world model on September 10, positioning the decade-old navigation tool as foundational infrastructure for spatial intelligence — a direct challenge to Google Earth's static digital-

China’s Robotaxi Race Reaches Europe: WeRide and Pony.ai Break Through the Regulatory Wall

WeRide and Pony.ai land back-to-back regulatory and operational milestones in Madrid and Zagreb on the same day, signaling a coordinated — if competitive — Chinese assault on Europe's fragmented AV market. On September 10, 2026, two Chinese autonomous driving companies executed their most consequential European moves yet

From Battery King to One of Many: How China’s EV Makers Are Reducing Their Dependence on CATL

The Battery King and Its Changing Court For most of the past decade, building a competitive electric vehicle in China almost certainly meant sourcing a battery from Contemporary Amperex Technology — better known as CATL, or Ningwang ("Battery King") in Chinese financial media. That arrangement is now changing in

DeepSeek Prepares V4.1 Flash With 3x Faster Output and Lower API Costs

DeepSeek is deploying its V4.1 Flash model on September 10, Beijing time, delivering output speeds of 300–400 tokens per second — more than triple its predecessor — while simultaneously cutting Flash-series API prices, a dual offensive that raises the competitive bar for every major large language model provider operating

DeepSeek Cuts Flash API Prices by 60% as the Fight for Developers Intensifies

The move marks DeepSeek's sixth pricing action in 2026 and underscores a structural shift in how China's large-model platforms compete for developer mindshare—on cost, not capability alone. DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based AI research firm whose models have repeatedly rattled global AI pricing benchmarks, announced

Baidu Takes DuMate Into 55 Million Homes as the AI Agent Race Moves to Hardware

Baidu is embedding its flagship AI agent directly into consumer hardware, using its Xiaodu smart device ecosystem to plant DuMate inside more than 55 million Chinese households — a strategic maneuver that reframes the AI competition from cloud-based user metrics to physical-world penetration. At the Baidu AIDAY·2026 Xiaodu

XPeng Takes Humanoid Robots From Prototype to Production With an 80%-Automated Line

0:00 /2:27 1× XPeng activated its dedicated humanoid robot production line on September 8, becoming the first Chinese automaker to complete a full "R&D-to-mass-production" cycle for a general-purpose humanoid robot — a milestone that shifts the industry's competitive axis

Li Auto Bets RMB 2.65 Billion on Battery Independence, Reshaping Its CATL Dependency

Li Auto is executing a calculated pivot away from commodity battery procurement, investing RMB 2.65 billion (US$368 million) into Sunwoda EVB while simultaneously rolling out proprietary 5C battery technology across its entire vehicle lineup — a dual move that signals the company is building industrial-grade supply chain control,

DeepSeek's $2.56B Huawei Chip Order Exposes China's AI Infrastructure Inflection Point

A single purchase order for 160,000 Ascend 950DT chips signals that China's AI compute stack has permanently bifurcated from the West—and that Huawei Technologies is now the sole credible supplier at scale. Bloomberg reported on September 4, 2026, citing people familiar with the matter, that DeepSeek