Sign in Subscribe

Dora Zhang

Editor covering China's business and technology, focused on AI, electric vehicles, autonomous driving, and robotics, tracking industry developments, innovation, and market dynamics.

China EVs End H1 Strong, Leapmotor Nears 100K Monthly Deliveries

China's electric vehicle market ended the first half of 2026 with a broadly positive set of delivery figures, as eleven brands reported June data on Tuesday, revealing a widening gap between fast-growing challengers and established names facing competitive pressure. Leapmotor led the disclosed results with 93,376

DeepSeek's $7.1 Billion Pivot: From Frugal Lab to Capital-Intensive AI Contender

DeepSeek's first-ever external fundraise marks a structural turning point for China's most closely watched AI lab, ending an era when capital restraint itself functioned as a competitive advantage and opening a far more expensive race that frontier AI companies can no longer avoid. On June

China's "Tesla of Robotics" AI² Robotics Hits RMB 20B Valuation — The Real Test Starts Now

A Shenzhen humanoid robotics startup has secured a RMB 20 billion (US$2.78 billion) valuation on the back of nearly RMB 5 billion (US$694 million) in fresh capital — but its 2024 revenues measured only in the tens of millions of yuan, exposing a chasm between investor conviction and

China's EVs Court Europe as U.S. Slams the Door Shut

Germany's industrial crisis hands Chinese automakers a rare foothold in Europe's third-largest car market, even as Washington's "connected vehicle" rules effectively bar Chinese-linked brands from American roads. The divergence could not be starker. Within days of each other in late

Horizon Robotics Deploys HSD V2.0 Amid Customer Chip Self-Development Risk

Horizon Robotics rolled out its largest-ever software upgrade on June 30, but the update arrives as the Chinese autonomous driving chip supplier faces a structural reckoning: its two biggest customers are building the very technology they currently buy from it. The HSD V2.0 over-the-air update — spanning

ByteDance Shifts Doubao to Enterprise AI Coding Amid Rising Compute Costs

ByteDance is abandoning its consumer-traffic playbook for AI, repositioning its flagship Doubao model squarely at enterprise developers and coding agents — a strategic concession that free chat cannot sustain a business when daily compute costs run tens of millions of yuan against sub-RMB 1 million in daily revenue. The

China's Lithium Battery Exports Hit $40B in Jan-May 2026, Even as Unit Prices Scrape Historic Lows

Price deflation is decelerating sharply — but the real story is a structural re-routing of trade flows that is permanently redrawing the global battery supply map. China's lithium-ion battery exports surged 45% year-on-year to US$40 billion in the first five months of 2026, powered

ChinaBiz Briefing | Cambricon ¥1T, Kimi $31.5B, DeepSeek V4 Pricing, BYD Chip, 15 Embodied AI Unicorns

China's technology and capital markets closed the first half of 2026 with a cluster of milestones that collectively signal a sector in structural acceleration, not speculative drift. A domestic AI chipmaker crossed a valuation threshold that would have seemed implausible two years ago. A large language model startup

Kimi's Valuation Surges to $31.5 Billion as ARR Tops $300 Million

Moonshot AI, the Chinese artificial intelligence startup behind the Kimi large language model, has launched a new funding round at a pre-money valuation of $31.5 billion, up sharply from the $20 billion valuation at which its previous round was priced, according to people familiar with the matter. The

Cambricon Crosses RMB 1 Trillion Threshold, Cementing China's Domestic AI Chip Crown

Cambricon became China's first AI chip company to breach the RMB 1 trillion (US$138.9 billion) market capitalization barrier on June 30, 2026, a milestone that crystallizes the convergence of aggressive state policy, accelerating import substitution, and a fundamental earnings inflection that has transformed the stock from