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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.

Unitree Robotics IPO: What China's First Humanoid Robot Stock Tells Us About the Industry

When Unitree Robotics (688836.SH) opened for trading on Shanghai's STAR Market on August 19, 2026, its shares surged 629% above the issue price in the first minutes of trading — valuing the company at RMB 444.9 billion. The listing wasn't just a market event. It

Pony.ai Robotaxi Revenue Surges 691%, Signaling Shift From Burn-to-Scale to Earn-to-Scale

Pony.ai is rewriting the economics of autonomous driving: its second-quarter 2026 results show robotaxi revenue exploding 691% year-on-year while operating losses contracted by more than 100 percentage points, a rare combination in a sector historically defined by runaway cash consumption. The Nasdaq-listed autonomous vehicle company

Alibaba Offloads Gaming Unit Lingxi for $1.4B, Funneling Cash Into AI Arms Race

Trustar Capital's surprise overbid ends a months-long auction, marking the largest gaming M&A deal in China this year and crystallizing a structural shift: private equity is displacing Big Tech as the dominant buyer of premium gaming assets. The deal closed faster than most analysts expected.

VeriSilicon Doubles Revenue but Deepens Losses as R&D Spending Consumes Half of Sales

VeriSilicon, China's publicly listed semiconductor IP and chip design services firm, nearly doubled its first-half revenue in 2026 — yet burned through cash at an accelerating rate, underscoring the brutal economics of scaling a fabless model in a capital-intensive industry. The Shanghai-listed company reported H1 2026

Chinese Labs Seize Open-Source AI Frontier, Forcing U.S. Rivals to Rebuild Strategy

Most large open-source models released in the United States during the first seven months of 2026 were built on Chinese foundations — a structural shift that is reordering competitive dynamics across the global AI supply chain. Hugging Face's State of Open Models: Summer 2026 Observation Report, published this

Huawei's AITO Completes Its Lineup, Betting on China's L3 Window

Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance, the automotive alliance anchored by Huawei, has completed a full-spectrum product matrix spanning RMB 159,800 to RMB 1.388 million (US$22,200–US$192,800), launching its first million-yuan MPV and first rugged off-road SUV simultaneously — a dual move designed to

ChinaBiz Briefing | Apple's China AI Bet, SMIC's Pricing Power, DeepSeek's Agent Play

China's technology sector delivered a dense slate of signals on August 14 that collectively point in one direction: AI infrastructure is no longer a future investment thesis — it is the present operating reality reshaping earnings, product strategy, and global expansion plans across every major vertical. From a chipmaker&

Apple Trains China-Specific AI Model With Alibaba's Support

Apple is reportedly taking an unprecedented step in its China AI strategy, becoming the first foreign company poised to receive Beijing's approval to deploy a proprietary large language model in the country, according to people familiar with the matter. According to Reuters' report published on August 14,

SMIC Smashes Q2 Estimates as AI Demand Spillover Drives Mature-Node Pricing Power Into New Cycle

Semiconductor International Manufacturing Corporation (SMIC), China's largest contract chipmaker, posted second-quarter 2026 revenue of $3.006 billion — blowing past both analyst consensus of $2.87 billion and its own guidance of 14-16% sequential growth — as artificial intelligence infrastructure buildout redirects mature-node capacity demand toward domestic

ChinaBiz Briefing | Alibaba Open-Sources Qwen3.8, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Tencent Bets Big on AI

August 13, 2026 marks one of the densest single-day news cycles in China's tech calendar this year. Three major AI releases landed within hours of each other, Tencent revealed a capex figure that stunned analysts, a smartphone startup redefined what a premium handset can do mechanically, and