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Yiyun Cai

Li Auto Bets on In-House Battery Mastery to Redraw EV Value Chain

Li Auto is staking its competitive future not on displacing battery giants, but on seizing the technical definition rights over the entire electric powertrain—a strategic posture that mirrors how Apple controls hardware-software integration while outsourcing manufacturing. The Beijing-based automaker formalized its in-house battery strategy at a

China's AI Giants Are Rebuilding From Scratch — And Dirty Data Is to Blame

A wave of pre-training restarts is exposing the industry's most expensive blind spot: years of scale-over-quality data strategies have left leading Chinese foundation model developers fighting a war they thought they had already won. Across China's AI landscape in the past six to

Li Auto's Chip Unit Eyes RMB 15 Billion Valuation in Spinout That Redefines China's Auto-Silicon Race

Li Auto is carving its in-house chip operation into a standalone company seeking external capital at a pre-money valuation of RMB 15 billion (US$2.08 billion), a structural bet that simultaneously offloads mounting R&D costs from a deteriorating balance sheet and positions the unit to

ChinaBiz Briefing | Alibaba's 20GW AI Bet, ByteDance Goes Physical, Unitree's Dexterous Hand, and a VLA Breakthrough

China's technology sector is undergoing a structural shift — from algorithm-first, asset-light strategies toward deep infrastructure ownership and hardware sovereignty. In a single day, Alibaba disclosed its most ambitious AI compute roadmap to date, ByteDance completed a multi-billion-dollar land acquisition spree in Beijing, and Unitree

Xiaomi Redraws AI's Price-Performance Frontier with MiMo-V2.6 launch

Xiaomi has launched and fully open-sourced its MiMo-V2.6 model series, deploying a $3.47 million reinforcement learning training campaign to deliver benchmark scores that rival closed-source frontier models — then pricing the API at a fraction of what Western competitors charge, effectively setting a new cost-performance

ByteDance’s Infrastructure Bet: From Algorithms to Real Estate

ByteDance, the Cayman Islands-registered parent of TikTok and Douyin, has spent roughly RMB 9 billion ($1.25 billion) acquiring four land parcels across Beijing in less than a year, signaling a shift from an asset-light operating model toward long-term infrastructure ownership as the company accelerates investment in

Alibaba Bets $20GW Data Center Empire on 'Machine Intelligence' Supercycle

Alibaba Group is staking its next decade on a single conviction: that the global supply of machine-generated intelligence will eventually dwarf human cognitive output by a factor of 1,000, and that whoever builds the infrastructure first will capture the commanding heights of that market. Speaking at the 2026

Chinese Research Team Reworks Driving VLA Training Around Spatial Cues

A joint research team from Beihang University, Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research , DiDi and Communication University of China has developed DriveTeach-VLA, a new training framework designed to address a fundamental weakness in vision-language-action models for autonomous driving — the disconnect between multimodal perception and

Unitree Unveils Dex5-S Hand at RMB 39,900 With 22 Degrees of Freedom

Hangzhou-based Unitree Technology, also known as Unitree Robotics, has launched the Dex5-S, a five-finger dexterous robotic hand priced from RMB 39,900 (US$5,542), increasing its focus on compact, human-scale manipulation as the robotics industry faces tougher scrutiny over commercial deployment. Announced on Sept. 21,

How Chinese EV Makers Choose Battery Suppliers

Battery sourcing has become an increasingly important issue for China’s electric vehicle industry. The key question is not simply which battery maker an automaker uses, but how it allocates battery orders across suppliers. August installation data from major EV makers and battery companies shows two distinct patterns: automakers often