South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics said on Wednesday it would end sales of all home appliance products in mainland China, retreating further from a consumer market increasingly dominated by domestic rivals as the group doubles down on its far more profitable semiconductor business. Samsung’s home appliance portfolio in China includes televisions, monitors, air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, vacuum cleaners and air purifiers. In a notice published on its official...

The release of DeepSeek’s latest large language model, V4, has been followed by a wave of adoption among domestic semiconductor manufacturers and artificial intelligence chipmakers, with firms racing to support the model on local hardware platforms. The shift comes amid rising geopolitical tensions over advanced semiconductors. Here are some of the key players enabling the model’s deployment on domestic hardware. Huawei Huawei Technologies was among the first to act, with the V4 fully adapted to...

Companies listed in mainland China have reached a historic milestone in their global operations. Total overseas revenues hit a record, with electronic and automobile giants such as Foxconn Technology Group and BYD among the top performers. Total overseas revenues of A-share companies approached 12.4 trillion yuan (US$1.8 trillion) last year, accounting for nearly 17 per cent of their total income – both figures representing all-time highs, according to data from state-backed newspaper Securities...

China and the United States are taking divergent paths to developing artificial intelligence (AI), putting their technology ecosystems increasingly at odds. This divergence was on show on April 24 when start-up DeepSeek launched its next-generation V4 AI models that were optimised for use with the Ascend chips and associated software tools of tech giant Huawei Technologies. China has for years been pursuing technological self-reliance, a policy reiterated by the Communist Party’s Politburo at...

China’s chip champions channelled a larger proportion of revenue into research and development (R&D) than their US peers, first-quarter earnings show, as Beijing presses ahead with its tech self-reliance drive amid an artificial intelligence boom. Beijing-based Moore Threads spent half of its revenue on R&D in the quarter ended March 2026, while Shanghai-based MetaX spent 45 per cent over the same period, according to exchange filings. By contrast, US chipmakers such as AMD and Intel have...

In China, computing facilities have emerged as a new form of infrastructure over the past two years, sparking an arms race among cities and technology companies to build 10,000-card computing clusters. These clusters – which link 10,000 or more artificial intelligence accelerator chips – enable faster iteration of AI capabilities and significantly reduce model training times. Domestic champions, from tech giants such as Huawei Technologies and Alibaba Group Holding to graphics processing unit...

A desk with a laptop and a stack of books. A shirt waiting to be folded. A kitchen counter, a milk-tea stand and pile of building blocks – all in a single room. Robots of different shapes face their tasks with focus, controlled by a human operator. Pick up. Place. Fold. Repeat. This is not a film set, it is a data collection factory for embodied intelligence – a de facto “data foundry”. The facility, in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang hi-tech zone, is run by Agibot, a fast-rising robotics company. The...