Xi pitches 2026 'landmark year' | Alibaba Cloud AI hits 30% of sales | Hua Hong Q1 net up 513%

May 14, 2026

Your morning brief on Chinese technology.

Beijing · Washington

Bottom Line Up Front

Xi and Trump held formal talks at the Great Hall of the People on May 14, with the Xinhua-sourced Caixin readout saying common interests outweigh differences and invoking the Thucydides Trap, though it did not specify whether export controls, AI or tariffs were addressed. Xi hosted a welcome ceremony for Trump at 10 a.m. the same day, calling 2026 a potential 'landmark year' for U.S.-China relations before the two leaders moved to bilateral talks. Alibaba Cloud reported 38% revenue growth to 41.626 billion yuan for the quarter ending March 31, 2026, with external commercial revenue up 40% and AI related products generating 8.971 billion yuan, topping 30% of external sales for the first time; cumulative T-Head GPU shipments surpassed 470,000 units as of February 2026.

Xi tells Trump "common interests outweigh differences" in Caixin readout of summit talks

Xi Jinping held formal talks with President Trump at the Great Hall of the People on the morning of May 14, with Caixin carrying the Xinhua-sourced readout. Xi said the two countries' common interests outweigh their differences, that each country's success is an opportunity for the other and that stability in China-U.S. relations benefits the world. Xi framed the talks around whether the two sides can transcend the "Thucydides Trap" and create a new model for major power relations. The readout did not specify which export control, AI or tariff items were addressed in the talks.

Read at Caixin ↗

Xi pitches 2026 as a "landmark year" for U.S.-China relations at Great Hall welcome ceremony

Xi Jinping held a formal welcome ceremony for President Trump at the east entrance plaza of the Great Hall of the People at 10 a.m. on May 14, with the two leaders moving inside for bilateral talks afterward. Trump told Xi, "It is an honor to meet with you, and it is an honor to be your friend," per the Caixin readout. Xi called 2026 a potential "landmark year" for U.S.-China relations in remarks at the ceremony.

Read at Caixin ↗

Alibaba Cloud Q1 external revenue grew 40%, AI products topped 30% of external sales for the first time

Alibaba Group reported results on May 13 for the quarter ending March 31, 2026, with Alibaba Cloud revenue up 38% year-over-year to 41.626 billion yuan and external commercial revenue, excluding consolidated Alibaba businesses, up 40%, Leiphone reported. AI related product revenue reached 8.971 billion yuan, the 11th consecutive quarter of triple-digit year-over-year growth, with AI's share of external revenue passing 30% for the first time. The company said cumulative T-Head GPU chip shipments reached over 470,000 units as of February 2026, with more than 60% serving external customers across more than 400 enterprises in internet, financial services and autonomous driving. Bailian platform customers grew eight times year-over-year as of March 2026.

Read at Leiphone ↗

SemiDrive closes nearly $100 million Series C led by Suzhou state capital, expanding from automotive to embodied AI chips

Automotive-grade chip designer SemiDrive announced on May 13 the close of a nearly $100 million Series C round, Leiphone reported. The round was led by Su Chantou, a Suzhou state-owned investment platform established in 2025, with Shaanqi Hongde Investment joining as a new strategic shareholder. Existing investors E-Town Capital, Beijing Advanced Manufacturing Fund, Xi'an Caijin and Yizhong Gentai participated in the round. SemiDrive said proceeds will fund full stack chip development from automotive to embodied AI applications.

Read at Leiphone ↗

Huawei says HarmonyOS 6 has crossed 60 million supporting devices, with NEXT engineering reportedly peaking at 40,000

Huawei announced on May 14 that the number of devices supporting HarmonyOS 6 has crossed 60 million, IT Home reported. A Chinese tech blogger said the same day that peak engineering headcount on HarmonyOS NEXT reached 40,000, larger than any major version of Android, iOS or Windows in their respective histories. The 40,000 figure is blogger sourced and has not been independently confirmed by Huawei.

Read at ITHome ↗

AI & FOUNDATION MODELS

Huawei publishes FlatQuant and MXFP quantization techniques for Ascend inference of DeepSeek and Qwen 3

Huawei's Ascend developer team published a technical note on May 14 describing FlatQuant and MXFP quantization methods designed for inference deployment of large language models on Ascend processors, CSDN AI reported. The post positions the Ascend quantization toolkit as a solution to memory and latency constraints for trillion parameter inference, citing DeepSeek and Qwen 3 as target workloads. As illustration, a 10 billion parameter model that requires roughly 20 GB of memory in FP16 fits in about 10 GB at INT8 and 5 GB at INT4 with the quantization approach. The post does not include accuracy versus compression benchmark numbers against NVIDIA inference paths.

Read at CSDN AI ↗

MediaTek and StepFun ship visual on-device deployment of a music LLM on Dimensity 9500

MediaTek unveiled the Dimensity AI Development Kit 3.0 at the Dimensity Developer Conference MDDC 2026 on May 13 and demonstrated on-device deployment of StepFun's ACE-Step music large language model on the Dimensity 9500 platform, Leiphone reported. The toolkit improved model porting speed by 50%, algorithm porting efficiency by 10 times and model compression by 58% at equivalent quality versus traditional SDKs, MediaTek said. Power consumption running on the Dimensity NPU dropped 42% compared with the same workload on the prior pipeline.

Read at Leiphone ↗

Tencent Cloud open-sources TencentDB Agent Memory, claiming 61% token cut for long agent tasks

Tencent Cloud released TencentDB Agent Memory as open source on May 14, providing short-term memory compression and long-term personalized memory for long-running agent task chains, IT Home reported. The module uses a "context offloading plus Mermaid task canvas" design to move complete history to external storage while preserving a structured task graph for tracing. In multi-task continuous session experiments, Tencent said the approach reduced token consumption by up to 61% while improving task success rates. The release is published on GitHub under the Tencent organization.

Read at ITHome ↗

DeepSeek pulls file uploads from Expert Mode citing "resources are tight"

DeepSeek removed the file upload feature from its Expert Mode on both web and mobile, IT Home confirmed on May 14, with the official notice reading "Resources are tight, file uploads not supported." DeepSeek's Quick Mode continues to support file and image upload, though image recognition remains limited to text extraction. DeepSeek is separately running a gray-scale test of chat history keyword search on web and mobile platforms.

Read at ITHome ↗

III

CHIPS & SEMICONDUCTORS

Hua Hong Semiconductor Q1 net profit rose 513% on higher ASPs and wafer shipments, Q2 revenue guided to $690 million to $700 million

Hua Hong (688347.SH) reported Q1 2026 revenue of 4.625 billion yuan, up 18.22% year-over-year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 140 million yuan, up 513.10% year-over-year, CLS reported on May 14. The company attributed the gross profit gain to higher average selling prices and wafer shipment volumes, plus foreign exchange gains in the current period versus losses a year earlier. Hua Hong guided Q2 2026 revenue to a range of $690 million to $700 million and Q2 gross margin to 14% to 16%. Q1 net profit of 140 million yuan was an 11% quarter-over-quarter increase from Q4 2025's 125 million yuan.

Read at CLS ↗

GRIPM confirms heat dissipation copper powder shipments for Huawei Ascend are "currently stable"

GRIPM Advanced Materials said on its investor interaction platform on May 14 that shipment volumes of its new heat dissipation copper powder for Huawei Ascend chips are "currently stable," responding to an investor question on why sales had not risen alongside the surge in Ascend chip shipments, CLS reported. Product sales depend on downstream market demand. The interactive platform answer did not quantify shipment volumes or specify whether GRIPM is the sole qualified source.

Read at CLS ↗