A new artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by the Chinese company behind TikTok rocked Hollywood this week - not just because of what it can do, but what it could mean for creative industries. Created by tech giant ByteDance, Seedance 2.0 can generate cinema-quality video, complete with sound effects and dialogue, from just a few written prompts. Many of the clips said to have been made using Seedance, and featuring popular characters like Spider-Man and Deadpool, went viral. What is Seedance - and why the stir? Seedance was launched to little fanfare in June 2025 but it is the second version that came eight months later that has caused a major stir.

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent received permission, as well, according to Reuters. The Chinese government has given DeepSeek its approval to purchase NVIDIA's H200 AI chips, according to . ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have also reportedly received permission from Beijing to buy a total of 400,000 H200 GPUs. says Chinese authorities are still finalizing the conditions they're imposing on the companies to be able to proceed with their orders, so it may take a while before they're able to receive their shipments. In addition, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told reporters that his company has yet to receive orders from the aforementioned firms and that he believed China is still finalizing their licenses. In December 2025, the US government allowed NVIDIA to sell its second-best H200 processors to vetted Chinese companies in addition to its H20 model in exchange for a 25 percent tariff on those sales.

Since 2021, China has reportedly poured $100bn into support for AI datacentres. Since 2021, China has reportedly poured $100bn into support for AI datacentres. Beijing's AI policy is focused on real-life applications but Chinese companies are beginning to articulate their own grand visions S tanding on stage in the eastern China tech hub of Hangzhou, Alibaba's normally media-shy CEO made an attention-grabbing announcement. "The world today is witnessing the dawn of an AI-driven intelligent revolution," Eddie Wu told a developer conference in September. " Artificial general intelligence (AGI) will not only amplify human intelligence but also unlock human potential, paving the way for the arrival of artificial superintelligence (ASI)."

Chinese firms are building battery plants from Europe to North America, promising jobs while prompting local concerns about the environment, politics, and who really benefits. When the rest of WIRED subscribers get their hands on our next print magazine, you, dear readers of Made in China, can proudly say you heard about it here first. The issue is all about China and includes stories about robots, AI boyfriends, a Chinese town that became the crystal capital of the world, and a Chinese DNA database built for family reunions. Like this newsletter, the issue is our attempt to document how deeply Chinese technology now shapes everyday life--no matter where you live in the world. As part of the issue, I reported a story on how Chinese lithium battery companies like CATL, BYD, and Gotion are now building factories on nearly every continent.

China's lithium batteries aren't always "made in China." Companies like BYD and CATL are building factories on nearly every continent. THE symbolism was clear last June when Emmanuel Macron, surrounded by factory workers, held up a sleek lithium battery in his right hand and a mining lamp in his left. He was in Douai, a northern French city with a coal mining history dating back to the 1700s. The city is now also the site of a battery factory, which would allow France to produce all parts of electric vehicles domestically. This factory, Macron declared, represented an "economic and ecological revolution."

They're starting to dominate entire sectors of AI and robotics. I decided to go to CES kind of at the last minute. Over the holiday break, contacts from China kept messaging me about their travel plans. After the umpteenth "See you in Vegas?" As a China tech writer based in the US, I have one week a year when my entire beat seems to come to me--no 20-hour flights required. CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, is the world's biggest tech show, where companies launch new gadgets and announce new developments, and it happens every January.

If a major disaster like Fukushima or Chornobyl ever happens again, the world would know almost straight away, thanks to an array of government and DIY radiation-monitoring programs running globally. Why Don't Norwegians Hate Tesla Like the Rest of Europe Does? November's Tesla registrations were down in France, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Norway, however, is bucking the trend--thanks to a tax incentive system that will soon be rolled back.

The world's top chipmaker wants open source AI to succeed--perhaps because closed models increasingly run on its rivals' silicon. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang arrives for a meeting with lawmakers in Washington, DC. Nvidia has made a fortune supplying chips to companies working on artificial intelligence, but today the chipmaker took a step toward becoming a more serious model maker itself by releasing a series of cutting-edge open models, along with data and tools to help engineers use them. The move, which comes at a moment when AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are developing increasingly capable chips of their own, could be a hedge against these firms veering away from Nvidia's technology over time. Open models are already a crucial part of the AI ecosystem with many researchers and startups using them to experiment, prototype, and build.

How Hong Kong gave rise to Labubu and a designer toy movement now shaping global culture. The following sentence might make a globalist cry out for joy: A toy that is manufactured by a Chinese company in Vietnamese factories, designed by a Dutch artist in Belgium, inspired by indie toy culture in Hong Kong, and made viral thanks to a Thai K-pop star, has turned into the biggest Gen-Z cultural trend of 2025. That abomination of a sentence is the story of Labubu, the creepy-cute stuffed monster that swept the world this summer. You must have seen the trend by now, but most people are still unaware of the global, decade-long story that led up to it. Last week, I published a feature story about my journey into the heart of Labubu, how this cultural mania moment was created, and where it may go from here.

A series of corporate leaks show that Chinese technology companies function far more like their Western peers than one might imagine. A trove of internal documents leaked from a little-known Chinese company has pulled back the curtain on how digital censorship tools are being marketed and exported globally. Geedge Networks sells what amounts to a commercialized "Great Firewall" to at least four countries, including Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Myanmar. The groundbreaking leak shows in granular detail the capabilities this company has to monitor, intercept, and hack internet traffic. Researchers who examined the files described it as "digital authoritarianism as a service."