The AI boom is making the world’s cheapest smartphones disappear

5 October 2026 at 05:00

The world’s cheapest smartphones are disappearing because AI infrastructure is absorbing the components. Prices of existing smartphone models have risen by about 15% globally this year, while newly launched models...

Dario Amodei wants to slow AI. China isn’t taking orders

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

23 September 2026 at 05:00

China is pushing back on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s attempt to rewrite the rules of artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Amodei called for the global AI industry to slow the...

Playing both sides of the U.S.-China AI “Cold War”

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

16 September 2026 at 05:00

Saudi Arabia celebrated the launch of what it calls the world’s most advanced Arabic-language AI model earlier this month. The technology behind it came from China even as the kingdom...

Chinese businesses are giving away AI tokens with coffee, credit cards, and dumplings

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

4 September 2026 at 05:00

Artificial intelligence tokens — once a term familiar only to techies — are rapidly entering everyday life in China. Banks, cafes, and telcos, among other small and big businesses, are...

Taiwan’s six-year hunt for China’s undercover chip labs

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

2 September 2026 at 05:00

In the spring of 2020, a Taiwanese engineer felt “extremely lucky” to be offered a job as a chip designer at Blue Ocean Smart System, an American company based in...

Beijing is forcing a mass breakup with AI lovers

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

10 August 2026 at 05:00

For a week in July, 21-year-old college student Bagel Su cried every day as she counted down to the loss of her boyfriend. The breakup was not caused by betrayal...

Arizona wants Taiwan’s investors to think beyond chips

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

7 August 2026 at 08:00

In July, I sat among roughly 100 people in a packed conference room in Taipei as a speaker highlighted the industrial parks and tax rates of an American city nearly...

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) fabrication plant in Phoenix, Arizona.

In China, people are renting out their faces to AI

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou

27 July 2026 at 05:00

The artificial intelligence boom has created a new marketplace in China where people can rent out their faces. A growing number of online platforms are paying people anywhere between $15...

China’s AI talent race is starting in high school

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

21 July 2026 at 05:00

Yang is immensely proud of his 13-year-old son. The middle-school student from Hangzhou has won artificial intelligence model-building competitions across China, and has 136,000 followers on Chinese social media platform...

Chinese universities are cutting language majors to make way for AI

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

22 June 2026 at 05:00

As artificial intelligence reshapes the global economy, Chinese universities are rapidly redrawing the landscape of what is worth studying. In recent months, Chinese universities have actively cut foreign language and...

GoPro and Roomba were U.S. pioneers. Chinese rivals now dominate

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

19 June 2026 at 08:00

After moving to Taiwan and taking up scuba diving, I recently started shopping for an underwater camera. What began as a simple search quickly turned into an exploration of the...

A customer experiences the Osmo Pocket 4 camera at a DJI store in Shanghai, China, on April 20, 2026. (Photo by Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Can open-source beat OpenAI?

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

15 June 2026 at 05:00

As the U.S. and China battle for artificial intelligence supremacy, a fundamental divide in engineering philosophy could determine the winner. While American pioneers like OpenAI and Anthropic favor a closed-source...

China’s tech rise is creating a new kind of tourism

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

28 May 2026 at 05:00

For decades, the pilgrimage route for ambitious tech founders, investors, and engineers led to Silicon Valley. Now, a growing number of them are flying to Shanghai, Hangzhou, or Shenzhen instead....

What’s at stake for tech at the Trump-Xi meeting

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou and Kinling Lo

13 May 2026 at 05:00

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet in Beijing this week amid the urgent geopolitical tensions surrounding the war in Iran and the status...

Some Taiwanese drone math ahead of the Xi-Trump visit

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

8 May 2026 at 08:00

For at least the past two U.S. administrations, cutting China out of the tech supply chain has been a strategic goal in multiple industries. But the drone industry is one...

The quiet layoffs sweeping China’s tech giants

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

29 April 2026 at 05:00

Chinese tech giants are quietly shrinking their workforce — echoing a pattern playing out in Silicon Valley. In 2025, e-commerce major Alibaba reduced its head count by 34% as it...

War in the Gulf could tilt the cloud race toward China

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

9 April 2026 at 05:00

The U.S.-Israel war on Iran may be creating a narrow opening for Chinese tech companies in the Gulf. On March 16, China’s Huawei Cloud posted a message on X highlighting...

The great Chinese EV exodus

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

9 February 2026 at 03:00

China’s electric-vehicle makers are going global to avoid going under. A price war at home and shrinking government support have thrown the industry into flux, with analysts predicting only 15...

China is running the EV playbook on humanoid robots — and it’s working

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

5 February 2026 at 04:00

While Silicon Valley spent 2025 polishing its marketing decks for the humanoid future, China was busy shipping the robots. Nearly 90% of all humanoid robots sold globally in 2025 were...

G1 Robot, a humanoid agent AI avatar by Unitree Robotics, takes center stage at the Web Summit Qatar 2026

BYD burns profit chasing global dominance over Tesla

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo and Ananya Bhattacharya

13 January 2026 at 00:11

Winning the global electric-vehicle race is costing BYD dearly. The Chinese EV giant reported a 33% drop in profit for the period from July to September, marking its second consecutive...

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