Chinese tech giant Xiaomi will skip directly to the Xiaomi 17 smartphone series after last year’s Xiaomi 15 line-up in a bold move to compete against Apple, which unveiled the iPhone 17 family last week. “The Xiaomi 17 series represents a generational leap in product capability,” said Lei Jun, the founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, in a social media post on Monday. The new devices were “fully benchmarked against the iPhone and ready for head-to-head competition!” he added. Xiaomi has moved up...

China’s antitrust regulator said on Monday it found Nvidia in violation of the country’s anti-monopoly law and would proceed with further investigation, which could lead to punitive actions against the American chipmaker amid escalating technology rivalry with the US. The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said in a one-line statement that Nvidia violated both antitrust laws and the Chinese government’s terms of approval for the company’s acquisition of Israeli interconnect...

The leaders of OpenAI and Nvidia plan to pledge support for billions of dollars in UK data centre investments when they head to the country next week at the same time as President Donald Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The two companies are teaming up with London-based data centre business Nscale Global Holdings on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang are part of...

Chinese technology and mobile gaming giant Tencent Holdings has appointed banks for its first bond offering in four years. The company is proposing to sell offshore-yuan denominated notes with five-year, 10-year and 30-year tenors as early as Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the matter. It said Bank of China and JPMorgan Chase would be the joint global coordinators, with Bank of Communications and Morgan Stanley serving as the joint bookrunners for the deal, the person added. If...

A technical innovation has allowed Alibaba Group Holding, one of the leading players in China’s artificial intelligence boom, to develop a new generation of foundation models that match the strong performance of larger predecessors while being significantly smaller and more cost efficient. Alibaba Cloud, the AI and cloud computing division of Alibaba, unveiled on Friday a new generation of large language models that it said heralded “the future of efficient LLMs”. The new models are nearly 13...

Pre-order sales of Apple’s new iPhone 17 series have got off to a robust start in China, shattering previous records despite delays in the shipment of the iPhone Air. In the first minute after pre-orders began at 8pm Friday local time, sales on JD.com – one of China’s largest online shopping platforms – surpassed the first-day pre-order volume of last year’s iPhone 16 series, according to the e-commerce operator. The standard iPhone 17 with 256GB of storage emerged as the most popular variant,...

Since April, mainland Chinese consumers have been spoiled for choice, as instant commerce competition brought dazzling promotional subsidies and speedy deliveries right to their doorsteps. Instant commerce – a turbocharged combination of online shopping and swift dispatch – had already made a typical lunchbox order cost around US$1 or US$2, which covered the food and the delivery fee. On-demand delivery giant Meituan’s “Grouping for Good Meals” campaign, for example, offered a four-dish set meal...