Chinese AI sensation Moonshot's gamble on big models pays off People visit the Moonshot AI stand, featuring the Kimi K3 model, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Saturday. Crowds rushed to an obscure corner of China's premier tech summit, moving past monumental booths from Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings to catch a glimpse of the hottest name in domestic artificial intelligence. Developers and users at the World AI Conference jostled for a closer look at Moonshot and its Kimi K3 -- the giant 2.8 trillion-parameter model whose release on Friday showed China was closing the gap on OpenAI and Anthropic PBC far quicker than anticipated. The startup became an instant global sensation, drawing comparisons to DeepSeek's 2025 breakout and plaudits from the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Such was the crush over the weekend that Moonshot blew through its entire stock of branded swag in just a few hours. Moonshot's emergence is a vindication not just for the country's AI industry, but also for founder Yang Zhilin.

China's Moonshot plans IPO in six months after AI breakthrough A Kimi logo is pictured at the Moonshot AI stand, featuring the Kimi K3 model, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Saturday. Moonshot AI has told investors it's preparing to list in as early as six months, seizing the opportunity to tap capital markets after its latest model upended industry perceptions of China's burgeoning capabilities and sent global tech stocks reeling. The Chinese AI pioneer has officially distributed the shareholder resolution to its investors, seeking the blessing of its backers on a Hong Kong listing, people familiar with the matter said. The initiation of the notification process indicates an IPO could happen as soon as within the next six months. Moonshot is now in the process of wrapping a fundraising round that may value the three-year-old startup at more than $30 billion, the people said.

Moonshot AI's Kimi upends conventional wisdom on U.S. lead over China People walk past the Moonshot booth promoting its Kimi K3 AI model, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Friday. At an event in Beijing earlier this year, some of China's top artificial intelligence leaders warned that the country remained meaningfully behind the U.S. in developing cutting-edge AI models, with one executive arguing that "the gap may actually be widening." Leading U.S. firms also appeared confident they were significantly ahead. As recently as last week, one executive at Anthropic, who spoke on condition of anonymity, mused that the Claude maker's technology was roughly six to 12 months ahead of Chinese rivals. The Chinese AI lab released Kimi K3, a more advanced open-weight model that it said outperforms all rivals except for Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 on overall capability.

China's Xi says AI'should not be a solo performance by a single country' Artificial intelligence should not be dominated by one country, Chinese President Xi Jinping has said, urging international cooperation on development at a major conference in Shanghai. Chinese AI models are gaining ground on the most powerful offerings from the US, attracting global users with lower costs. But how to govern the booming sector has become a topic of debate amid concerns over the deployment of AI in military combat and its use by hackers or criminals. In his address, Xi spoke of China's role in ensuring equitable access to AI capacity-building for developing countries to prevent the creation of "new historical injustices". To that end, he announced China's plans to cooperate with international bodies, including from Africa, Latin America, Asia and BRICS countries, to provide AI-related opportunities.

China's AI ascendance gives Xi a stage and a security dilemma The rise of China's AI models is handing President Xi Jinping new bragging rights and a stronger claim to shaping the technology's global rules. The rise of China's AI models is handing President Xi Jinping new bragging rights and a stronger claim to shaping the technology's global rules, even as their growing power stirs security alarm in Washington and Beijing alike. Xi is expected to make his case in his debut at the World AI Conference in Shanghai starting Friday, an event that previously attracted Elon Musk and Jack Ma. He'll be addressing scores of tech and government leaders as Chinese models win over companies worldwide, with their share of U.S. firms' AI usage nearing record 60% on the popular marketplace OpenRouter. In what could be a preview of Xi's position, state media this week cast China's openness as the antidote to a world of walls. The Communist Party's flagship mouthpiece People's Daily warned against an "AI Iron Curtain," contrasting an "oil mindset" that hoards data and computing power with a "water" approach that treats AI as a public good for all, without naming any country.

'They don't need people': the workers left behind by China's robot drive KUNSHAN, China - The park was in the center of China's richest county. Willow trees clustered around a well-manicured pond. Joggers in performance gear circled shiny new playgrounds filled with children. But in a quieter part of the park, Hu Xinbing was resting after another day of trying, unsuccessfully, to win his share of the local prosperity. After failing to find a job that morning, Hu, 31, lay behind some bushes, using a windbreaker as a pillow, and waited until he could try again the next day. Around him, about a dozen other out-of-work men had claimed their own corners of the park in Kunshan, about 30 miles outside Shanghai, dozing on benches or inside tents.

Understanding how individual metro usage evolves over multi-year horizons is essential for transit planning and passenger retention. However, existing approaches typically characterize mobility patterns as static clusters or short-term variability, leaving the lifecycle dynamics of transit participation underexplored. This study proposes a state-based lifecycle modeling framework that integrates Hidden Semi-Markov Models (HSMM) with discrete-time survival analysis to characterize the evolution of individual metro mobility. The HSMM infers latent mobility states with explicit duration distributions and a transition matrix governing regime changes, while the survival component models exit and re-entry events via state-dependent hazard functions conditioned on mobility-state trajectories and behavioral history. Applied to four years of smart card data from the Shanghai metro system (2021-2024), the framework enables the identification of interpretable mobility states, the characterization of transition dynamics, and the quantification of state-dependent exit and re-entry processes. The analysis reveals five robust mobility states with a directional transition hierarchy centered on an occasional-usage gateway state, and fundamentally different temporal mechanisms governing disengagement and return: exit hazard is state-dependent but duration-independent, whereas re-entry hazard decays sharply with inactivity length. These findings provide a methodological foundation for lifecycle-oriented mobility analysis and practical guidance for transit operators to identify at-risk users and time retention interventions.

With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the innovative data center uses seawater as a natural cooling system. China is submerging data centers into the ocean to keep them cool.Photograph: Shanghai Hailanyun Technology China has become the first country in the world to operate an underwater data center, or UDC, powered by wind. Located off the coast of Shanghai, the complex represents a significant advance in the country's strategy to secure energy supplies in the face of the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce the environmental impact of its technology infrastructure. The initiative is the result of a collaboration between private company HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction, which involved an investment of 1.6 billion yuan, equivalent to about $236 million. With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the facility is submerged at a depth of 10 meters in the Lin-gang Special Zone, within the China Pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai.

The world's carmakers are struggling to compete with China Global carmakers are facing a reckoning as US, European and Japanese brands lose ground to Chinese rivals setting the pace not only in electric vehicles, but also in batteries, design and software. The BBC visited factory floors in Beijing and Hefei on the sidelines of Auto China 2026 - the world's largest car show - and found striking levels of automation and software development speed, leaving foreign brands that once dominated the Chinese market struggling to keep up. We have no chance against this, Honda chief executive Toshihiro Mibe told Japanese media after visiting a highly automated factory in Shanghai. Ford chief executive Jim Farley has also warned that Western carmakers, are in a fight for our lives as Chinese rivals expand globally. After decades spent investing in joint ventures with Chinese partners to build vehicles, foreign carmakers are now changing the nature of those partnerships to stay competitive.

The Chinese company is adapting to the demise of Moore's Law, which guides chip production. It could complicate US chip dominance. Tingbo He, president of Huawei's chip-design subsidiary HiSilicon, says her company's engineers have developed a novel way to optimize semiconductors--and she believes it will close the performance gap between Chinese and Western chips over the next few years. Huawei's method, in short, focuses on speeding up computations across chips, circuits, and entire computing systems, rather than squeezing ever-more components onto a single piece of silicon. "We found a new path," He said at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems in Shanghai last weekend.