ByteDance maps $70B AI buildout | Huawei Tao Law silicon in Mate 90 | April industrial profits jump 24.7%

May 27, 2026

Your morning brief on Chinese technology.

Beijing · Washington

Bottom Line Up Front

ByteDance is weighing $70 billion in 2026 AI capex on data centers and infrastructure, drawn mostly from $50 billion in 2025 profit, alongside internal discussion of a $100 billion 2027 scenario and a separate agreement to buy millions of Qualcomm ASIC chips for its AI Agent service. Huawei confirmed Tao Law chips ship in the Mate 90, with Kirin 2026 silicon reaching 238 MTr/mm² transistor density, up 53.5% on the prior generation, plus a 41% gain in P-core energy efficiency and a 3.1GHz peak frequency, all produced through a fully domestic design-to-packaging chain. NBS data show electronics drove 43.8% of the January to April 2026 rise in above-scale industrial profits, with the sector growing 107.7%, overall industrial profits reaching about 2.44 trillion yuan, and April profits up 24.7% year over year.

ByteDance is discussing a 2026 spending plan of up to $70 billion (about 475.9 billion yuan) on data centers and AI infrastructure, according to Bloomberg sources cited by ITHome. Most of the funding would come from the company's roughly $50 billion in 2025 profit, with this year's range put at 400 to 500 billion yuan against approximately $25 billion in 2024 capex. If conditions hold, ByteDance has internally discussed raising 2027 capex toward $100 billion. Bloomberg also reported this week that ByteDance has agreed to buy millions of Qualcomm ASIC chips for its AI Agent service.

Read at ITHome ↗·Read at Pandaily ↗

Huawei says Tao Law silicon already shipping in Mate 90 with near-3nm process performance

Huawei Financial Systems CTO Zheng Jun said at the 2026 Phoenix Bay Area Financial Forum in Shenzhen on May 27 that chips designed under the Tao Law are already shipping in the Mate 90, with near-3nm process performance. The Kirin 2026 silicon reaches 238 MTr/mm² transistor density, up 53.5% from the prior generation, with a 41% improvement in P-core energy efficiency and a 3.1GHz peak frequency. Zheng said Huawei has connected its chip manufacturing chain from silicon design through packaging entirely with domestic suppliers. Semiconductor business president He Tingbo first presented the Tao Law framework at the May 25 IEEE ISCAS keynote in Shanghai. Pandaily's English summary frames the device as the Kirin 9050 and reports claims of TSMC 3nm-class performance without EUV lithography.

Read at ITHome ↗·Read at Pandaily ↗

Electronics sector accounts for 43.8% of January to April industrial profit growth, NBS data show

China's above-scale industrial enterprise profits grew 24.7% year over year in April 2026, an 8.9-percentage-point acceleration from March, according to National Bureau of Statistics data released May 27. The electronics sector posted 107.7% profit growth over the first four months of 2026, contributing 43.8% of the increase in above-scale industrial profits. Chemicals profits grew 73.4% and nonferrous metals 117.8% over the same period, while equipment manufacturing and consumer goods profits declined when electronics is excluded. Cumulative January to April industrial profits reached about 2.44 trillion yuan, up 18.2% year over year.

Read at Caixin ↗

Moore Threads CEO says one Chinese application now consumes more than 140 trillion tokens a day

Moore Threads founder and CEO Zhang Jianzhong said at the company's May product launch in Beijing that daily token consumption from a single unnamed domestic application has exceeded 140 trillion. Prior industry forecasts had put total market consumption at 30 trillion to 180 trillion tokens per day. Moore Threads unveiled a cloud to edge roadmap covering compute and ecosystem, plus a Linux-based agent platform branded Xiaomai. The company cited IDC projections of 2.216 billion active AI agents globally by 2030 and 350 million Chinese enterprise agents by 2031. China's 2026 government work report named "intelligent agents" as a priority for the first time, with adoption targets above 70% by 2027 and above 90% by 2030.

Read at Leiphone ↗

POLICY & REGULATION

MIIT completes 2026 automotive standards plan covering solid-state batteries, AV software and automotive AI

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has finalized its "2026 Annual Automotive Standardization System," CCTV News reported. Priority research areas in the new plan include automotive quality reliability and solid-state battery standards system research. The framework updates subsystems for data governance and automotive AI. It accelerates standards for driving automation, networked functions, information and data security, automotive software, automotive data and "vehicle-road-cloud integration," with automotive electronics and automotive chips flagged as key system component standards. MIIT also named automotive AI and new-form vehicles as forward-looking standards priority areas.

Read at ITHome ↗

MIIT Minister Li Lecheng outlines four cooperation priorities at BRICS forum in Xiamen

The 2026 BRICS Partnership on New Industrial Revolution Forum opened in Xiamen, Fujian on May 27. MIIT Minister Li Lecheng's keynote outlined four priorities: capturing technology transformation opportunities, building open and interconnected markets, strengthening industrial development foundations, and constructing an inclusive cooperation framework. Li listed standards cooperation, certification cooperation and joint smart factory builds as priorities under the open-market pillar. Li said Beijing seeks closer cooperation with BRICS partners on smart manufacturing policy, technology, talent and standards.

Read at CLS ↗

III

AI & FOUNDATION MODELS

Kling AI Q1 revenue tops 650 million yuan with March ARR approaching $500 million

Kling AI's Q1 2026 operating revenue exceeded 650 million yuan, up more than 300% year over year, Kuaishou disclosed alongside its quarterly results. The video generation product's annualized revenue run rate reached approximately $500 million in March 2026. Kuaishou launched the Kling 3.0 series models in February 2026 with updates to model capabilities, product systems and application scenarios.

Read at CLS ↗

MiniMax teases M3 release after M2 arXiv paper details sparse-activation architecture

Shanghai-based MiniMax (Xiyu Technology) previewed its upcoming M3 series models in a May 27 post on X. The post referenced a May 26 arXiv paper detailing the M2.x series. The architecture has 229.9 billion total parameters and activates 9.8 billion per token, with a 192K context window and 29.2 trillion pretraining tokens. The M2 series uses a 62-layer decoder Transformer with 256 fine-grained experts and activates eight per token. MiniMax also introduced an agent-oriented reinforcement learning system called Forge. MiniMax said the system has absorbed 30% to 50% of the team's daily iteration workload and produced a 30% performance gain in internal coding scaffold optimization.

Read at ITHome ↗

Polar Interactive deploys Alibaba's Wan2.7 video model in "Never Say Die" animated series, claims 90% efficiency gain

Polar Interactive Technology and Mahua FunAge produced the animated series "Never Say Die" using Alibaba's Wan2.7 video model. The content has topped 300 million views on Chinese video platforms. The Polar Interactive team said it can produce about three minutes of high-quality content per person per day with Wan2.7, a more than 90% efficiency improvement over traditional production workflows. China launched more than 40,000 AI generated animated short series in 2025. Wan2.7 is Alibaba's latest video model, covering text to video, image to video, reference to video and video editing.

Read at Leiphone ↗

ROBOTICS & AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS

Pudu Robotics releases PuduFM 1.0 embodied AI foundation model after near 1 billion yuan funding round

Pudu Robotics released its PuduFM 1.0 embodied intelligence foundation model and PuduAgent platform under a "one brain, multiple forms" strategy. The launch follows a roughly 1 billion yuan funding round in April that put Pudu's valuation at 10 billion yuan. Pudu has deployed more than 130,000 robots across more than 80 countries, with overseas revenue consistently above 80% of total. Commercial cleaning revenue accounts for more than 70% of total. Pudu's industrial AMR shipments topped 4,000 units in their first year on the market.

Read at Leiphone ↗

Jianbot Robotics and Ant Group affiliate Ant Lingbo announce partnership on human-data-driven embodied AI model training

Jianbot Robotics (Beijing) and Shanghai Ant Lingbo Technology announced a strategic partnership on May 26 focused on "human data-driven model cognitive evolution." The companies called it the industry's first collaboration combining human-native data with embodied intelligence large models. Ant Lingbo has released its LingBot series of embodied intelligence models covering spatial perception, dexterous manipulation and environmental feedback. Jianbot CEO Chen Jianxing said the company has accumulated more than one million hours of human behavioral data through its proprietary GenDAS collection devices and data governance platform.

Read at Leiphone ↗