UBTech Robotics, one of China’s top robot manufacturers, said on Tuesday it had secured a major contract to deploy humanoids at border crossings to perform tasks such as guiding travellers, conducting inspections and handling logistics, as the country intensified efforts to apply robotics in the real world. The company has struck a 264 million yuan (US$37 million) deal with a humanoid robot centre in Fangchenggang, a coastal city in the southern autonomous region of Guangxi, which shares a...

AI Singapore (AISG) – a national programme by the city state of Singapore to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence – has chosen to base its latest large language model on Alibaba’s Qwen, in a significant win for the Chinese technology giant as it promotes its AI services in Southeast Asia. AI Singapore, designed to enhance the city state’s national AI capabilities, had released a new model, Qwen-SEA-LION-v4, based on Alibaba’s Qwen3-32B foundation model to better address the...

Alibaba Group Holding, China’s e-commerce and cloud computing giant, on Tuesday reported a better-than-expected 5 per cent increase in revenue for the September quarter, as its cloud and artificial intelligence businesses continued to gain momentum. Total revenue for the Hangzhou-based company reached 247.8 billion yuan (US$34.8 billion) for its financial second quarter ended September 30, beating the consensus estimate of 245.2 billion yuan by Bloomberg-polled analysts. That was more than the 2...

Huawei Technologies on Tuesday revealed that its next-generation Kirin 9030 system-on-a-chip powers the more advanced models of its newly launched 5G Mate 80 series smartphones. Shenzhen-based Huawei listed the Kirin 9030 as the processor for the 12-gigabyte random access memory (RAM) version of the Mate 80 Pro, while its Kirin 9030 Pro version is built into the 16GB RAM Mate 80 Pro, the Mate 80 Pro Max and Mate 80 RS models, according to the official website for the company’s latest flagship...

UBTech Robotics, one of China’s top makers of humanoid robots, plans to raise HK$3.11 billion (US$399.6 million) through a share placement in Hong Kong – its sixth and largest such fundraising since last year, riding on growing industrial orders and the sector’s momentum. The Shenzhen-based company aimed to sell 31,468,000 new shares for HK$98.80 each, representing a discount of around 11.4 per cent from the closing price on Monday, according to a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange on...

Anthropic is rolling out a new version of its most powerful artificial intelligence model that is designed to be better at automating coding and office tasks, part of an effort to compete with OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google for business customers. The new model, Claude Opus 4.5, was more capable than previous versions at software engineering work, like fixing bugs, without needing a user’s help, Anthropic said. Opus 4.5, released on Monday, is also intended to be better at carrying out complicated...

A US non-profit has released a suite of “fully open” artificial intelligence models – disclosing its training data and pipelines in full – in a bid to challenge Chinese dominance in the open-source AI arena. The Allen Institute for AI, also known as Ai2, on Thursday released the latest Olmo series of models with their full training data and training pipelines available for public inspection. The move goes beyond the common practice of Chinese open-source AI developers, who typically make only...