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Bottom Line Up Front The effects of China's bismuth export controls are surfacing, with refined exports of the metal falling over 80% from 2024 to 2025 under February 2025 issued controls. China holds roughly 75% of global reserves and over 85% of production. MOFCOM and seven ministries issued the Opinions on Accelerating "AI+Consumption" Development, the first Chinese policy package targeting AI through retail and services adoption rather than chip supply. MIIT ordered platform giants to interconnect distributed compute resources and open token-based services for small and medium-sized enterprises under a 2026 through 2028 Action Plan, which also designates eight priority future industries including embodied intelligence, BCI, biomanufacturing and commercial aerospace and mandates a national integrated compute monitoring and scheduling platform. |
| Bismuth export controls bite as China's refined exports of the metal collapse Refined bismuth exports fell from 3,797 tons in 2024 to 714 tons in 2025, an over-80% drop, while domestic average prices doubled from 72,500 yuan ($10,000) per ton at end-2024 to 146,000 yuan ($21,000) per ton in June 2026, per Wallstreetcn. China imposed the controls on bismuth metal, alloys and bismuth germanate on Feb. 4, 2025 through Ministry of Commerce and Customs Announcement No. 10. Bismuth feeds molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) two-dimensional transistor contact layers, an experimental class of materials chipmakers are testing for advanced nodes, and high-density phase-change memory (PCRAM). PCRAM is a nonvolatile memory class meant to replace conventional DRAM and NAND in some workloads. China holds roughly 75% of global bismuth reserves and over 85% of production, with no scalable substitute capacity outside the country in the near term. |
| MOFCOM and seven other ministries issue first AI demand-side framework, naming humanoid robots and brain-computer interfaces as priority consumer tracks The Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), which oversees trade and domestic commerce policy, co-issued with seven other central ministries the Opinions on Accelerating "AI+Consumption" Development, the first Chinese policy package targeting AI adoption through retail, household and services rather than chip and compute supply, per Wallstreetcn. The document lays out 17 measures across five areas. Humanoid robots, brain-computer interfaces (BCI), which are devices that translate neural activity into control commands, and augmented-reality (AR) smart glasses are explicitly named as priority consumer electronics tracks. Five named service scenarios cover home living, elderly care, cultural tourism, hospitality and dining, and education, with CCTV announcing the document the same day. |
| MIIT directs platform giants to interconnect compute and open token services for small firms The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which sets China's industrial and telecom policy, and six other departments released an Action Plan for the Coordinated Development of Large, Medium and Small Enterprises in the Platform Economy covering 2026 through 2028, per Yicai. The plan directs platform enterprises to open and interconnect their distributed compute resources and management platforms and to enhance token-based services, where tokens are the basic units large models use to process input and output. A national integrated compute monitoring and scheduling service platform is to be built under the plan. The same Action Plan separately names eight priority emerging and future industries, including embodied intelligence, BCI, biomanufacturing and commercial aerospace, and tasks platform enterprises with onboarding small and medium-sized enterprises into them. |
| Google reportedly weighing CXMT DRAM for its next-generation Tensor Processing Unit A leaked post on X attributed to a source linked to Google CEO Sundar Pichai claims Google is evaluating dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) from Chinese memory maker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) for its supply chain, with analyst Jukan amplifying the leak, per CnBeta. The likely destination is Google's next-generation in-house AI accelerator, the "Humufish" Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), for which Google plans to stock roughly 3.5 million chips through end-2028. CXMT sits on the interagency End-User Review Committee's pending Entity List queue that the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has so far declined to act on, per Reuters. CXMT is lifting wafer capacity from about 200,000 to 300,000 wafers per month by year-end and preparing a domestic IPO. |
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| MIIT minister's two-day Zhejiang tour names preferred national champions in BCI, humanoids and smart glasses MIIT Minister Li Lecheng visited Hangzhou on June 17 and 18, with disclosed stops at BrainCo for brain-computer interfaces, Unitree for humanoid robots, Rokid for smart glasses, networking equipment maker H3C and the state-backed Zhejiang Lab, per the official MIIT bulletin Gongxin Weibao. The site list functions as a minister-level pick of preferred national champions for the 15th Five-Year Plan emerging industries push, the same plan period that began at the start of 2026. Li used the phrase "industry sets the question, technology answers" and reiterated MIIT's continuing crackdown on what Beijing calls "involutionary competition," its term for self-defeating price wars and capacity races among Chinese firms. |
| MOFA rebuffs G7 critical minerals de-risking statement, calling for "market economy rules" instead Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said at the regular press briefing that China's willingness to safeguard critical mineral security is unchanged after G7 leaders agreed to step up coordination to cut their reliance on Chinese supply, per CCTV News. Lin urged G7 governments to "abide by market economy rules and stop using exclusive cliques to undermine the financial order." The G7 leaders' statement set a target of reducing reliance on any single supplier outside the bloc for rare earths and permanent magnets to below 60% by 2030, with an aim of 50% as soon as possible, and launched a critical minerals platform with an expanded role for the International Energy Agency. |
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| III | AI & FOUNDATION MODELS | |
| Zhipu's STAR Market IPO tutoring advances and broker switches as Hong Kong market cap clears HK$930 billion ($119 billion) The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) updated Beijing Zhipu Huazhang Technology's STAR Market IPO tutoring status to "tutoring acceptance review," advancing the process toward an A-share listing, per Caixin. Zhipu switched its tutoring broker to Guotai Haitong Securities after CICC terminated its co-tutoring role, narrowing the underwriting setup to a single state-aligned firm. The status update follows Zhipu's same-day release of its open-source GLM-5.2 model, which ranked second globally on the Code Arena coding benchmark behind Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. Zhipu's Hong Kong shares closed at HK$2,094 a share, up more than 26%, with market capitalization above HK$930 billion ($119 billion). |
| Hedge funds run an explicit Zhipu-long, MiniMax-short pair trade as Chinese AI lab valuations bifurcate Western hedge funds are running a structured long-Zhipu, short-MiniMax position on Chinese frontier model labs as the two stocks have moved in opposite directions, per Bloomberg, Gavekal and HSBC. Zhipu's Hong Kong shares are up roughly 170% since end-March while MiniMax is down about 50% over the same window. MiniMax cut M3 model prices 50% one week after launch and drew rating moves from Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. HSBC estimates 65% of MiniMax shares come off lockup on July 8 versus only 6% of Zhipu shares the day before, creating opposing technical positions ahead of the lockup expiry. Bloomberg's consensus has Zhipu revenue rising roughly 250%. |
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| Wuhan SOE takes 47.88% of Wuhan Xinxin from YMTC, separating a top Chinese NOR Flash foundry from YMTC's IPO vehicle Optical Valley Semiconductor Industry Investment, a Wuhan municipal state-owned enterprise, is acquiring a 39% stake in Wuhan Xinxin from YMTC Group, after which Optical Valley will hold 47.88% and YMTC Group's stake will drop from 68.19% to a minority, per a State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) Chongqing posting. Wuhan Xinxin is one of China's largest NOR Flash foundries, the memory category used for firmware storage in cars and industrial systems, and has 55-nanometer radio-frequency silicon-on-insulator (RF-SOI) capacity in mass production, a process that supports the radio-frequency front ends in 5G handsets. The deal entered public comment on June 17, with the period running to June 26. YMTC withdrew Wuhan Xinxin's earlier STAR Market application in May and is now running its own IPO guidance period. |
| Cambricon market cap nears 1 trillion yuan ($140 billion) on rumored ByteDance accelerator orders, company denies Domestic AI accelerator firm Cambricon's stock rose more than 16% intraday, lifting market capitalization to a peak around 965.6 billion yuan ($140 billion) before paring gains, per Yicai. Cambricon's investor relations line issued a same-day denial of online claims that 120,000 to 160,000 MLU580 chips shipped to ByteDance in the second quarter with MLU690 deliveries in the second half, dismissing the circulating account as an unofficial online rumor, urging investors to rely on official disclosures and saying the company had hosted no internal briefing recently. ByteDance is in talks with smaller domestic rival Tianshu Zhixin for at least 50,000 inference accelerators, with Huawei and Cambricon also in the supplier mix. |
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| V | ROBOTICS & AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS | |
| Xinghaitu open-sources its G0.5 vision-language-action model and debuts a bipedal humanoid robot Beijing-based embodied AI lab Xinghaitu open-sourced its G0.5 vision-language-action (VLA) model, an architecture that takes camera images and text instructions and outputs robot motion commands, at its first global developer conference, per InfoQ China. Xinghaitu also debuted Kengo, a 1.4-meter bipedal humanoid that demonstrated four consecutive kicks and bimanual manipulation. The company announced a joint venture with the Beijing Yizhuang government, Yi Shu Intelligence, that will collect one million hours of real-world demonstration data for embodied model training. The data target matches the one-million-hour figure ACE Robotics disclosed for its own training corpus on June 15. |
| Central SOE Guoxin Fund and Temasek's Yifeng Capital anchor Manifold AI's latest world-model round One-year-old Chinese world-model lab Manifold AI closed a fresh round of several hundred million yuan with new investors including Guoxin Fund, an investment vehicle of central state-owned holding company China Reform, and Yifeng Capital, a Temasek subsidiary, per Caixin. Industrial backers BAIC Industry Investment and Xinneng Ventures joined alongside four existing shareholders. Manifold has now closed six rounds in one year with cumulative Pre-A funding near 1 billion yuan ($140 million). World models are AI systems that simulate physical environments and predict next states, a class Chinese labs including Manifold and Xinghaitu pursue as a data-light alternative to imitation learning at scale. |
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| Beijing watches White House push Anthropic to harden Fable 5 jailbreak defenses before any re-release The Trump administration has told Anthropic that the company must address "jailbreak" vulnerabilities in Claude Fable 5 before it can re-release the model, with the BIS AI Standards & Innovation Center and the National Security Agency both involved in the assessment, per Wallstreetcn. Anthropic withdrew Fable 5 last week under U.S. export control pressure after agencies assessed that safety guardrails could be bypassed to elicit cybersecurity, chemical and biological risk content from the underlying Mythos base model. Zhipu's open-source GLM-5.2 currently sits at #2 on Code Arena behind Fable 5, and Zhipu's Hong Kong shares are up roughly 170% since end-March. |
| BIS and DOJ template Huawei FDPR self-disclosure with Bosch's $36 million settlement and first NatSec non-prosecution decision Bosch's BST and ETAS subsidiaries will pay a roughly $36.18 million BIS civil penalty plus disgorgement of about $11.43 million in pretax profits to resolve Huawei export allegations, per CnBeta. The subsidiaries exported about $72.37 million of MEMS sensors and automotive software to Huawei from September 2020 through September 2024 in violation of the Foreign Direct Product Rule (FDPR). The U.S. Justice Department's National Security Division also issued its first non-prosecution decision under its updated enforcement policy, signaling a template for how non-U.S. multinationals can self-disclose suspected FDPR breaches in exchange for reduced penalties. A third-party foundry unnamed in the BIS papers warned Bosch about the restricted Huawei flow in June 2023. |
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