My mom and Dr. DeepSeek

2 September 2025 at 05:00

Every few months, my mother, a 57-year-old kidney transplant patient who lives in a small city in eastern China, embarks on a two-day journey to see her doctor. She fills...

China’s chip startups are racing to replace Nvidia

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

1 September 2025 at 05:00

DeepSeek said last month that its latest artificial intelligence model is compatible with domestic AI chips that would be released soon, unleashing a surge of interest in a handful of...

Why China has a tech manufacturing advantage over the U.S.

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

29 August 2025 at 05:00

China is good at making things and is getting better. Since launching economic reforms in the early 1980s, it has become the world’s hub for producing everything from toys to...

The 2025WAIC World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

The Mongolian startup defying Big Tech with its own LLM

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

22 August 2025 at 05:00

Silicon Valley firms are rushing to train artificial intelligence models with tens of thousands of graphics processing units, and offering multimillion-dollar salaries to star researchers. Meanwhile, in Mongolia, Badral Sanlig...

As China goes all in on AI, tech workers scramble to learn new skills

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

1 August 2025 at 05:00

On a recent Monday evening, several Chinese participants joined a livestream on Zhihu, a Q&A platform similar to Quora, and were greeted by an instructor who said her name was...

The world’s top EV battery maker pulled off 2025’s biggest IPO. Here’s what to know

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

20 May 2025 at 05:00

China’s CATL, the world’s biggest electric battery maker, starts trading in Hong Kong this week, after a $4.6 billion IPO, the biggest so far this year. CATL has about 38%...

A launch event for the CATL Bedrock chassis in Shanghai, China, Dec. 24, 2024.

Why Apple can’t just quit China

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

13 May 2025 at 05:00

Patrick McGee’s new book, Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, is out this week, just as the U.S. and China agreed to lower tariff levels for...

People are seen in the flagship Apple Store in Beijing, China, April 2025.

Chinese sellers and U.S. buyers prepare for the end of ultracheap shopping

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

23 April 2025 at 05:00

Phillip Dampier, in Rochester, New York, spends up to eight hours a day on Chinese shopping sites, and has already shelled out about $3,500 on electronics and home goods. He...

FILE -- A shopper at a Shein pop-up store at The Shops at Willow Bend in Plano, Texas, Aug. 26, 2022. Two bipartisan bills were introduced in Congress this week seeking to change a nearly 100-year-old trade law that allows imported packages that fall under a certain price threshold to receive less oversight while moving through the United States customs process. Shein is one of the companies the bills would affect. (Cooper Neill/The New York Times)

Trump’s tariffs are testing Nvidia’s chip supremacy. Can Jensen Huang weather the storm?

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

8 April 2025 at 10:20

Stephen Witt’s new book, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip, is out this week, just as U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs have prompted fears...

Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., on March 18, 2025.

This is how China skirts U.S. chip bans

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

1 April 2025 at 05:00

President Donald Trump’s administration last week added 80 companies — mostly Chinese — to a list of firms barred for national security reasons from acquiring U.S. technology. The move expands...

How a Chinese battery factory sparked a political meltdown in a small Michigan town

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

11 March 2025 at 05:00

In the spring of 2024, Chuck Thelen came to an unpleasant conclusion: He would have to eat part of a battery. It was, he figured, maybe the only way to...

Gulf of Mexico vs. Gulf of America: How digital maps display disputed names

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou and Khadija Alam

28 February 2025 at 06:00

After U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America in January, some digital maps quickly made the change, at least for...

Chinese Temu sellers use fake U.S. postage labels to boost their profits

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

11 February 2025 at 06:00

Some Chinese Temu merchants are padding their profits by using counterfeit postage labels to trick the U.S. Postal Service into delivering packages for free. Posts on Chinese social media openly...

"High postage costs eat into the razor thin margins of small e-commerce shippers.

DeepSeek’s rise shows why China’s top AI talent is skipping Silicon Valley

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

5 February 2025 at 06:00

At the end of his internship at Nvidia in 2023, Zizheng Pan, a young artificial-intelligence researcher from China, faced a pivotal decision: stay in Silicon Valley with the world’s leading...

Engineers at DeepSeek have built a generative AI model for far less than competitors.

U.S. TikTokers flock to Xiaohongshu, baffling and bonding with Chinese users

Rest of World

By: Kinling Lo and Viola Zhou

14 January 2025 at 17:02

American high school student Venus Rios sparked a flurry of chatter when she posted this week on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, writing in Chinese characters. “Hi Chinese netizens! I...

Foxconn stops sending Chinese workers to India iPhone factories

Rest of World

By: Selina Cheng and Viola Zhou

10 January 2025 at 06:00

Foxconn is halting new work rotations for its Chinese employees at its Apple iPhone factories in India, and sending Taiwanese workers instead, according to five people familiar with Foxconn’s operations...

Employees test mobile phones on an assembly line in the mobile phone plant of Rising Stars Mobile India Pvt., a unit of Foxconn Technology Co., in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, India, on Friday, July 12, 2019.

The most surprising tech champions of 2024

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou， Lam Le， Daniela Dib， Damilare Dosunmu and Ananya Bhattacharya

6 December 2024 at 06:00

Lesser-known tech companies were rewarded by changing headwinds outside the West this year. India’s homegrown EV industry, a Chinese video game that became a soft power success, and a U.S.-based...

How 2024’s tech trends changed our lives

Rest of World

By: Lam Le， Damilare Dosunmu and Viola Zhou

2 December 2024 at 06:00

In 2024, Rest of World covered some of the biggest shifts in the tech industry that have changed lives around the world: the rise of AI, Chinese companies expanding overseas,...

The U.S. Chinese immigrants running Temu shipping centers from their homes

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou

15 November 2024 at 06:00

In Eason Lin’s cramped one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, the living room is a maze of hundreds of boxes. All of the packages will soon ship out to Americans...

TikTok wants to turn millions of Americans into paid shopping influencers

Rest of World

By: Viola Zhou and Peiyue Wu

14 October 2024 at 05:00

Brandy Leigh, a 50-year-old mother of six in Indiana, was looking for a career that would allow her to work from home. After raising children for most of her adult...

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