Alibaba Group Holding has slashed charges for its biggest artificial intelligence model by as much as half, triggering speculation of another price war in China’s highly competitive AI market. Qwen3-Max, the first trillion-parameter model from Alibaba Cloud, was one of the company’s most expensive models on its release in September, with tiered pricing that charged a minimum of US$0.861 per million input tokens and US$3.441 per million output tokens for application programming interface (API)...

China’s internet giants are poised to drive the continued adoption of artificial intelligence in the country, with AI chip shortages unlikely to pose significant obstacles for the sector in the short term, according to JPMorgan analysts. Sustained user adoption of AI features would be a key theme in the coming year despite the absence of “clear evidence” of AI monetisation in China, said Alex Yao, co-head of Asia-Pacific technology, media and telecoms equity research, in a briefing on...

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), China’s largest chip foundry, said on Friday that full-year revenue is on track to hit an all-time high of more than US$9 billion, as tight foundry capacity and supply-chain localisation keep its fabs running at full tilt. “The iterative effects across the supply chain are continuing, which leads to a stronger-than-usual off-season. Our production remains in a state of supply falling short of demand,” co-CEO Zhao Haijun said on an...

Hangzhou-based AI and augmented-reality (AR) glasses maker Rokid on Thursday unveiled a lightweight, AI-powered eyewear device built in partnership with Chinese eyewear brand Bolon, as rivals race to make smart glasses the next mass-market device after the smartphone. The new model features a 38.5g D-shaped black frame and supports customised prescription lenses, allowing it to be worn like a regular pair of sunglasses with a more fashion-focused look. It includes a physical control button and a...

Alibaba Group Holding’s global business-to-business (B2B) marketplace, the wholesale platform serving more than 200,000 merchants, on Friday unveiled a new artificial intelligence tool designed to make cross-border trade more efficient. Alibaba.com, which operates under the group’s international commerce arm, has created “AI Mode” for its online search engine to help global users reliably find the products they need, according to Zhang Kuo, the platform’s president. Alibaba owns the South China...

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Chinese suppliers such as Huawei Technologies will be excluded from the country’s future telecommunication networks on security grounds as he pushes for more digital sovereignty. “We have decided within the government that everywhere it’s possible we’ll replace components, for example in the 5G network, with components we have produced ourselves,” Merz told a business conference in Berlin on Thursday. “And we won’t allow any components from China in the 6G...

Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings is laying the groundwork for what many see as the next frontier of artificial intelligence by investing in “world models” that simulate the physical environment, according to its head of 3D generation and world modelling. China’s most valuable tech conglomerate joins a fast-growing cohort that includes Google DeepMind and Elon Musk’s xAI in exploring “spatial intelligence”, which some experts have described as “AI’s next great frontier”. On Wednesday, AI...