CATL Octopus UK truck swap | NVIDIA BESS gates Chinese vendors | Shenzhen raises compute

Your morning brief on Chinese technology.

Bottom Line Up Front

CATL and Octopus Energy launched a 50-50 UK joint venture on June 22 to build a heavy-truck battery-swap network in Europe using CATL's Qiji Energy technology, with first stations slated for 2027 and a planned 30-plus station network by 2035 that the partners say could serve over 300,000 electric trucks and draw more than £30 billion of private investment. Huawei Cloud's MaaS platform passed a new "Trusted AI - Token Service Quality" assessment in June, clearing a six-dimension review that follows CAICT's mid-June Token Service Capability Climbing Plan to standardize large-model invocation efficiency and lower vendor-switching costs. Shenzhen named “compute infrastructure” as one of six core city networks alongside water, the new electricity grid, next-generation telecom, underground utilities and logistics, mirroring at the municipal level the State Council's 15th Five-Year Plan framing of compute among the "six grids."

CATL and Octopus Energy, the UK's largest household energy supplier, announced on June 22 a 50-50 joint venture to build a heavy-truck battery-swap network in Europe, bringing CATL's Qiji Energy swap technology to the European market. The first demonstration stations are slated to open in the UK in 2027, prioritizing motorway trunk lines and key logistics ports before extending to Scotland and Wales. By 2035 the network is planned to reach more than 30 stations covering Britain's core truck routes, which the companies say could serve over 300,000 electric trucks and generate more than £30 billion ($38 billion) of private investment in Europe. CATL says swap economics push electric heavy-truck operating costs below diesel, with a depleted battery exchanged in minutes versus close to an hour for current fast charging.

Read at CnEVPost ↗

Huawei Cloud passes CAICT's new Trusted-AI Token Service Quality assessment

Huawei Cloud's Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform cleared the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology's (CAICT's) "Trusted AI - Token Service Quality" assessment in June, per Securities Times. CAICT, the research arm of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), built the assessment around six dimensions covering model service capability, token service performance, service trust, operations, user experience and metering and billing. The Token Service Capability Climbing Plan is an initiative CAICT launched in mid-June 2026 together with about 10 leading enterprises to standardize large-model invocation efficiency and service quality, with the core goal of building a unified system so that companies face lower costs when switching between vendors.

Read at Yicaistate media ↗·Read at NetEase ↗

Shenzhen raises compute to one of six core city networks, applying national compute-infrastructure framing at the municipal level

The Shenzhen Municipal Party Committee on June 23 held a planning meeting that listed compute alongside water, the new electricity grid, next-generation telecom, underground utilities and logistics as one of six city "networks" for the metropolitan area to build out, per Yicai. The directive calls for systematic layout and flexible supply to "strengthen compute capacity supply, deepen compute interconnection and emphasize compute-electricity coordination," echoing State Council language on compute-electricity coupling. The same plan accelerates a national internet backbone direct-connect point, 6G research and commercialization, "dual-10-gigabit" network rollout and satellite network applications under the next-generation telecom heading.

Read at Yicaistate media ↗

36Kr frames Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 takedown as a window for non-U.S. AI labs to close the gap

36Kr described the American regulatory order that took Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models offline last week as a sign that North American AI regulation lacks a unified standard, with the same technical vulnerabilities addressed unevenly across vendors. The article suggests the Trump administration’s regulatory action was less a routine safety enforcement than a political treatment, arguing the same jailbreak flaw exists across mainstream models yet strict action fell only on Anthropic, which it attributes to accumulated friction and commercial disputes between Anthropic and regulators rather than any quantified standard. 36Kr argues the forced takedown of a leading domestic model hands overseas AI teams a window to catch up, and notes earlier friction between Anthropic and regulators had coincided with Claude customer adoption spikes.

Read at 36Kr ↗

AI & FOUNDATION MODELS

ByteDance's Volcano Engine ships Doubao 2.1 Pro and reports 180 trillion daily tokens and 49.5% of China's public-cloud model-as-a-service market

ByteDance's cloud unit Volcano Engine on June 23 released the Doubao 2.1 Pro foundation model at its Summer FORCE conference in Beijing, citing upgrades across coding, agent and visual-language model (VLM) capabilities, per CSDN AI. Volcano Engine president Tan Dai said Doubao's daily token call volume exceeded 180 trillion as of June, a more than 10-fold rise over the past year, and cited IDC data placing Volcano Engine at 49.5% of China's public-cloud model-as-a-service market, the largest single share. The company released Doubao 2.1 Pro alongside its Seedance 2.5 and Seedance 2.0 4K video models, the Seedream 5.0 Pro image model and the Doubao 1.0 audio generation model in a five-model release pack. Tan said the model crosses a coding and agent "quality threshold" reached only by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, per Volcano's own evaluations.

Read at CSDN AI ↗

III

ROBOTICS & AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS

Laifu Harmonic clears HKEX listing hearing as Chinese harmonic-reducer prices fall 29% over two years and squeeze Japan's Harmonic Drive

Chinese harmonic-reducer maker Laifu Harmonic, the industry's second-largest player, cleared the Hong Kong Stock Exchange main-board listing hearing on its way toward becoming the "first harmonic-reducer Hong Kong stock," 36Kr reported. The company's prospectus shows its harmonic-reducer average selling price fell from 802 yuan ($112) in 2023 to 724 yuan ($101) in 2024 and 573 yuan ($80) in 2025, with Laifu attributing the cuts to a strategic price adjustment to expand market share. Industry leader Lvde Harmonic held 27.5% of the China market in 2025, against Laifu's 21.4% and Japan's Harmonic Drive at 4.4%, per Laifu's prospectus. 36Kr describes Lvde as widely speculated to be a leading harmonic supplier inside Tesla's Optimus humanoid. Each humanoid robot uses 14 to 20 harmonic reducers, the precision gearboxes inside each robot joint, versus 3 to 6 reducers in a traditional industrial robot.

Read at 36Kr ↗

AgiBot puts Genie G2 humanoids on the full quality-inspection workstation of a Chinese tablet factory for a six-day live deployment

Multiple AgiBot Genie G2 humanoid robots entered Longcheer Technology's Nanchang tablet factory in Jiangxi on June 23 for a six-day continuous live-streamed deployment covering the full tablet quality-inspection workstation, per CSDN AI. The G2 cluster runs alongside line workers on the standard factory shift, performing multimedia interface tests, audio tests, radiated-emission tests and coupling tests autonomously, AgiBot says. AgiBot calls the deployment the first commercial-grade humanoid scaling case to cover an entire quality-inspection workstation in 3C electronics, the computer, communications and consumer electronics assembly category where Chinese contract manufacturers dominate global production. Longcheer robotics business head Li Long said traditional automation cannot adapt to multi-product mixed-line inspection at acceptable changeover times while the G2 supports flexible cross-station reuse.

Read at CSDN AI ↗