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

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...

Will the Meta-Manus deal push more Chinese AI startups to Singapore — or shut the door?

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

9 January 2026 at 06:00

Meta’s acquisition of Manus, a Chinese-origin artificial intelligence agent startup, has swiftly turned from celebration to complication. The Chinese government has said it will review the estimated $2 billion deal...

PARIS, FRANCE - JUNE 15: The logo of the U.S. company created by Mark Zuckerberg, Meta is displayed during the Viva Technology conference at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on June 15, 2023 in Paris, France. Viva Technology, the biggest tech show in Europe but also in a unique digital format, for 4 days of reconnection and relaunch thanks to innovation. The event brings together startups, CEOs, investors, tech leaders and all of the digital transformation players who are shaping the future of the Internet. The annual technology conference, also known as VivaTech, was founded in 2016 by Publicis Groupe and Groupe Les Echos and is dedicated to promoting innovation and startups. (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)

In Chinese data factories, workers teach humanoid robots boring tasks

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou and Kinling Lo

7 January 2026 at 06:00

Inside a brightly lit office in Shanghai, Kim’s task for the week was to pretend he was opening the door of a microwave. Wearing a virtual reality headset and exoskeletons...

Humanoid robots follow technicians to learn job skills at the data collection area of an embodied AI robot innovation center on September 14, 2025 in Shaoxing, of China.

Chinese AI unicorns beat Silicon Valley giants in race to go public

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo

6 January 2026 at 06:11

Two Chinese challengers to ChatGPT are set to go public this week. Zhipu AI and MiniMax will debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on January 8 and 9, respectively,...

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