China’s expanding semiconductor industry is fuelling anxiety in South Korea, where a new report from PwC has warned local chipmakers to defend profitability as Chinese rivals scale up production and strengthen market share. Samil PwC, the South Korean member firm of the global consultancy, said in a report made public on Monday that Chinese competition would likely heat up first in the areas of conventional memory, mature-node manufacturing, and packaging and testing. To stay ahead, Samil PwC...

Long before artificial intelligence became the next big thing in the tech industry, Wang Jian was crafting the foundational infrastructure that would eventually power it. In 2008, he joined Alibaba Group Holding – owner of the South China Morning Post – as chief architect and founded Alibaba Cloud in 2009, convincing the company’s leadership to invest heavily in building a cloud computing infrastructure from scratch. Today, Wang’s purview has expanded considerably. As an academician at the...

Are China’s increasingly powerful open-weight AI models a cybersecurity threat, or could restricting them ultimately make the internet less secure? The dilemma has become a growing concern as Chinese developers including DeepSeek, Z.ai and Alibaba Group Holding – owner of the South China Morning Post – continue to challenge their American rivals by releasing models that anyone can download, modify and deploy. The growing impact of advanced AI on global cybersecurity has also forced governments...

While few dispute that China is narrowing the gap with the United States in developing artificial intelligence (AI) models, there is one area where Chinese firms are already the undisputed leaders: video. China has seen a proliferation of advanced generative AI video models – systems trained on visual data to generate or edit video content based on user inputs such as text prompts, images and audio. The country’s vast short-video ecosystems and looser copyright rules have helped give Chinese...

After HSBC RedCoin launched on Friday, Anchorpoint – the stablecoin-issuing joint venture led by Standard Chartered – said it plans to launch a retail product on a public blockchain, even as it takes a “prudent approach”. “Our next major milestone is to [help] bring regulated digital money into everyday payments and commercial applications, while connecting traditional payment infrastructure with this emerging digital finance,” said Dominic Maffei, CEO of Anchorpoint. “This is a public...

Long before artificial intelligence became the next big thing in the tech industry, Wang Jian was crafting the foundational infrastructure that would eventually power it. In 2008, he joined Alibaba Group Holding – owner of the South China Morning Post – as chief architect and founded Alibaba Cloud in 2009, convincing the company’s leadership to invest heavily in building a cloud computing infrastructure from scratch. Today, Wang’s purview has expanded considerably. As an academician at the...

Chinese technology giants are dangling annual pay packages approaching 1 million yuan (US$149,739) to attract artificial intelligence engineers who can turn AI models into commercial applications. Companies including ByteDance, Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding are stepping up recruitment and training of the so-called forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), who work directly with customers to develop and integrate AI applications into business operations. Demand for such professionals has...

China’s access to artificial intelligence computing power will double next year, but US-designed chips will account for about 65 per cent of that capacity, an indication of its continued reliance on foreign hardware, according to new research. Total compute available to Chinese entities was expected to expand in 2027 from about 4.6 million to 8.8 million “H100-equivalents” – a metric benchmarked against Nvidia’s data-centre graphics processing units, according to a report by the Washington-based...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is pitching the concept of “sovereign AI” in Kazakhstan – part of his global crusade urging nations to build domestic computing infrastructure using the firm’s chips – as the energy-rich nation emerges as a US-China battleground for artificial intelligence. Speaking at a fireside chat in Astana on Friday with Kazakh AI and digital development minister Zhaslan Madiyev, Huang said AI was reshaping every industry in a transformation that “affects every single person and...

Chinese artificial intelligence chip giant Cambricon Technologies reported a 147.7 per cent surge in third-quarter profit on Friday, as the country’s aggressive push to replace Nvidia chips continues to fuel high growth among local chipmakers. The Shanghai-listed chipmaker generated 1.4 billion yuan (US$210 million) in net profit for the three months ended September 30, up from 566.6 million yuan during the same period last year. Revenue reached 3.5 billion yuan, an increase of 104.5 per cent...