Chinese memory chip giant ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is pressing ahead with an alternative chip architecture that US rival Micron Technology has chosen to bypass, highlighting an industry divide over how best to pack more data onto silicon under cost and geopolitical constraints. The Hefei-based company planned to send customers samples of its first server-grade dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) product built on the 4F² architecture by the end of this year, according to a summary of...

Hong Kong has touted rapid progress in the first year of its five-year fintech strategy, pledging to double down on artificial intelligence and tokenisation even as many initiatives face the challenge of achieving commercial scale. Tokenisation, for instance, had moved from the sandbox “into the real world”, said Eddie Yue Wai-man, chief executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), at the city’s annual FinTech Week conference on Monday. Hong Kong had authorised 17 tokenised public funds...

China’s two largest carmakers, BYD and Geely Auto, recorded their strongest monthly sales of the year in October, bucking a downward trend in the world’s largest automotive market as smaller rivals come under increasing pressure to turn a profit. Shenzhen-based electric vehicle (EV) giant BYD handed over 490,168 cars to customers at home and abroad last month, up 11 per cent year on year, while Hangzhou-headquartered Geely delivered 310,183 petrol and electric cars worldwide in the same period,...

For the first time, the amount of inference data generated by artificial intelligence systems in China has surpassed the amount of data used to train those systems, according to a new government-backed report, illustrating how the country is increasingly adopting AI at scale. The report released on Saturday by the China Centre for Information Industry Development (CCID), which operates under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), cited recent official data showing that...

Hong Kong’s initial public offering (IPO) momentum has cooled sharply in the fourth quarter amid market volatility and tighter regulatory scrutiny, but industry players say a year-end rush of listings could still help the city secure a top-three global ranking for 2026. The market has slowed significantly since October, with only three new listings, all of which closed below their offer prices on debut. Two other IPO candidates shelved their listings after completing procedures, testing Hong...

When Chinese leader Mao Zedong and then US president Richard Nixon ended more than two decades of hostility in the early 1970s and began restoring ties, one powerful force pulling them together was a shared adversary in the form of the Soviet Union. Fast forward to today. The United States and China, the world’s two largest economies, have spent eight years locked in competition and confrontation, from trade and investment to technology, amid mounting fears that they are on a path to inevitable...

Using artificial intelligence to build even smarter systems will make artificial general intelligence (AGI) more achievable, though it would need to be done safely, leading Chinese computer scientist Tang Jie said at an event in Shanghai on Saturday. The remarks underscore how AI companies in the US and China are both chasing the holy grail of recursive self-improvement (RSI), where increasingly powerful AI systems also become better at improving themselves in an ever-accelerating...

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek has previewed a plan for a more autonomous AI agent that can handle multiple tasks with minimal human intervention, as it steps up competition with US rivals OpenAI and Anthropic in developing coding assistants. The proposed system, dubbed super agent, aimed to reduce the need for humans to coordinate multiple AI agents and monitor their progress, addressing a key bottleneck in managing today’s increasingly complex workflows, according to a...

Driving along the wide boulevards of Astana during a recent trip to the Kazakh capital, signs of China’s growing commercial footprint were everywhere. Chinese cars were becoming a common sight on the streets here, as brands from BYD to Changan made aggressive inroads in a market once dominated by South Korea’s Hyundai and Kia, said the driver who picked me up from the airport in a gleaming Changan electric vehicle. But it was not the rise of Chinese tech that had brought me to this energy-rich...

With US President Donald Trump recently pushing the use of “superintelligence” (SI) instead of artificial intelligence (AI) in national discourse, the acronym has gained unprecedented attention. It is the right acronym but the wrong meaning. In my opinion, SI should stand for “self-intelligence”. It probably explains why academics, critics and even major AI companies are calling for a temporary pause in AI development. They must have realised the technology’s current trajectory is headed down...