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Bottom Line Up Front Xi Jinping opened WAIC 2026, the World AI Conference, in Shanghai on July 17, criticizing U.S. technology restrictions and pledging 5,000 AI training slots for developing countries over five years alongside meteorological AI access for 30 nations. Twenty-nine countries signed the founding agreement on July 16 for the Shanghai based World AI Cooperation Organization, with founding members including Russia, Brazil, Serbia and 10 African and 12 Asian states; experts frame the body as a counterweight to the U.S.-led Pax Silica initiative. China's finance, customs and tax authorities imposed a phased consumption tax via Announcement 2026 No. 20, applying 2% rising to 4% on five incumbent battery types from Sept. 1, 2026, and on photovoltaic cells from April 1, 2027, while exempting sodium-ion and solid-state batteries, fuel cells, and perovskite, tandem and gallium-arsenide cells through 2028. |
| Xi Jinping opens WAIC calling for global AI cooperation, criticizes U.S. tech curbs Xi Jinping delivered the keynote at the opening of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai on July 17. The speech, titled "Working Together to Build a Fair and Reasonable Global AI Governance System," said AI development "should not be a solo performance by any single country but rather a symphony of global cooperation." Xi urged countries to oppose "overstretching the concept of national security" in AI, a longstanding Chinese objection to U.S. technology restrictions, and criticized U.S. curbs on tech sharing, per AP News. He committed China to providing 5,000 AI training slots for developing countries over the next five years and to giving 30 countries access to an AI meteorological early warning tool developed in China. |
| Twenty-nine countries sign founding agreement for Shanghai based World AI Cooperation Organization Representatives from 29 countries signed the founding agreement for the World AI Cooperation Organization on July 16 in Shanghai, on the eve of the WAIC opening. Founding members include Russia, Brazil and Serbia, along with 10 African and 12 Asian countries, and the organization will be headquartered in Shanghai. AP News quotes George Chen, partner and chair of digital practice at consultancy The Asia Group, saying the body can be viewed as China's answer to Pax Silica, the U.S.-led initiative launched late last year that aligns AI supply chains with allies including Japan, the UK and Australia. Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lin Jian said at the July 17 briefing that China will work with founding members to push for the organization's early launch and operation. |
| China imposes phased consumption tax on batteries and solar cells, exempts sodium-ion and solid-state The Ministry of Finance, General Administration of Customs and State Taxation Administration jointly issued Announcement 2026 No. 20, phasing a consumption tax onto batteries and photovoltaic (solar) cells. Consumption tax is China's excise tax on specific goods, applied at the manufacturer or importer level. Five incumbent battery types face 2% from Sept. 1, 2026, rising to 4% one year later: mercury free primary, nickel-metal hydride, primary lithium, lithium-ion and all-vanadium redox flow. Photovoltaic cells start at 2% on April 1, 2027, rising to 4% one year later. Sodium-ion batteries, solid-state batteries, fuel cells, and perovskite, tandem and gallium-arsenide photovoltaic cells are exempted through Dec. 31, 2028. Exemption requires products to meet national standards and hold a certification report from a provincially licensed testing body. |
| Shanghai commits subsidies of up to 40 million yuan per project for industrial AI development The Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization issued "Several Measures to Further Promote AI+Manufacturing Development in Shanghai" on July 17. The document sets per-project subsidy ceilings across six industrial AI tracks: industrial-vertical large language models, AI coding models, physical AI, industrial intelligent agents, industrial software and the industrial internet. Breakthrough research in each track can receive up to 20 million yuan (about $2.8 million) per project. The largest single ceiling is 40 million yuan (about $5.6 million) for firms renting nonaffiliated compute for training industrial large models and agents. Up to 10 million yuan (about $1.4 million) covers security frameworks for industrial models. Up to 5 million yuan (about $700,000) each is available for calling third-party large models and for purchasing high quality training corpora. |
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| NDRC releases AI development plan, MIIT guides ethics plan at WAIC The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China's top economic planner, released the "AI Cooperative Development Action Plan" with other departments at WAIC on July 17. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which licenses telecom and sets industrial policy, guided the release of a parallel "International AI Ethics Governance Action Plan" the same day. NDRC's plan sets out eight action tracks, including quality data supply, universal compute access and open-source ecosystem sharing. Both plans are framed around UN efforts on international AI cooperation, bridging the digital divide and AI-enabled sustainable development. MIIT committed to work with international bodies on ethics governance capacity building for developing countries and on open-sourcing explainability, privacy and bias correction technologies. |
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| III | AI & FOUNDATION MODELS | |
| Beijing AI lab Moonshot releases 2.8-trillion-parameter open-source Kimi K3 at WAIC Moonshot AI, following its June 12 Kimi K2.7 Code release, launched Kimi K3 on July 16, timed to the WAIC opening in Shanghai. The company describes it as the largest open-source AI model available to date. Kimi K3 uses a mixture-of-experts design in which only 16 of 896 expert sub-networks activate for any single query, cutting compute cost per query. Kimi K3 has 2.8 trillion parameters versus 1.6 trillion for DeepSeek's V4 Pro, per AP News. |
| China's weather agency open-sources 100-billion-parameter Fenghe meteorological model The China Meteorological Administration (CMA), China's national weather agency, released its Fenghe large language model at the WAIC meteorology sub-forum on July 17. CMA describes Fenghe as the world's first open-source meteorological large language model at 100-billion-parameter scale, designed for weather analysis, risk assessment and forecasting services. The model was co-developed by CMA's Public Weather Service Center, the Xiong'an AI Innovation Research Institute and Chinese AI firm Zhipu. It was trained on 50 million tokens of high quality meteorological data; tokens are units of text roughly equivalent to words or word fragments. CMA published Fenghe's full model weights on GitHub and Hugging Face. The model is deployed inside "Mazu," an AI meteorological warning system that now provides English and Chinese language question-answering, weather queries and risk analysis to global users. |
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| USITC opens Section 337 patent probe on Samsung HBM and DDR5 memory The U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), an independent U.S. federal agency that hears trade related patent disputes, opened a Section 337 investigation on July 16 targeting Samsung Electronics HBM and DDR5 memory. The complaint, filed by U.S. memory technology firm Netlist, alleges Samsung infringes two of its core memory patents; an adverse ruling would trigger a U.S. import ban on the covered products. HBM (high-bandwidth memory) is the specialized memory that feeds Nvidia's and AMD's data center AI accelerators, and DDR5 is the current standard for server memory. TMTPost places the filing alongside two other memory sector shocks this week. The July 15 Seoul prosecutors' raid on Montage, Renesas and Rambus over suspected memory interface chip collusion was covered in CTD's July 16 edition. On July 16, A-share memory stocks saw a net capital outflow of 17.62 billion yuan (about $2.5 billion) as Chinese memory maker CXMT began its Shanghai IPO subscription seeking about 29.5 billion yuan (about $4.3 billion). |
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| V | ROBOTICS & AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS | |
| Tencent open-sources Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0, an embodied vision-language foundation model Tencent released Hy-Embodied-VLM-1.0 on July 16, a second generation embodied vision-language foundation model. Embodied AI is designed to run inside robots or other machines that act on the physical world; vision-language models pair visual perception with language processing, so the system can process a scene and describe it in words. The model was co-developed by Tencent Robotics X Lab, Futian Lab and Tencent Hunyuan, the group behind Tencent's foundation model line. It uses a mixture-of-experts design that activates 3 billion parameters per query. Tencent's own benchmarks show a composite score of 65.6 across 37 embodied capability tasks. The company says this approaches the previous generation flagship, which activated 32 billion parameters per query. Tencent released weights and code on GitHub and Hugging Face under the Hy-Embodied namespace. |
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| Zhongke Tianta opens satellite laser communication terminal factory in Xi'an, plans 600 units yearly Xi'an Zhongke Tianta Technology (Zhongke Tianta) commissioned a satellite-borne laser communication terminal production line in Xi'an on July 16. Laser communication terminals are the optical modules that connect satellites to each other in orbit. Low Earth orbit constellations depend on these intersatellite links to route data across the network instead of relaying every signal through the ground. The technology was built jointly with the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, per Science and Technology Daily. The institute has developed more than 100 satellite-borne laser communication terminals since 2004, some already operating in orbit. Production terminals cover 5 to 100 gigabits per second and adapt to different low orbit constellation designs. Phase 1 planned annual capacity is 600 terminal sets; Zhongke Tianta targets more than 1,000 sets per year by 2027. |
| China Unicom Beijing and Huawei launch citywide 5G-A high-uplink network China Unicom's Beijing branch and Huawei launched what the companies describe as the world's largest commercial 5G-Advanced (5G-A) high-uplink network in Beijing on July 15. 5G-A is an interim mobile standard between 5G and 6G. "High-uplink" means the network is engineered to move large volumes of data from user devices up to the cloud. That reverses the download heavy design that has defined mobile networks to date. The Beijing network runs across more than 10,000 base stations and uses Huawei's 3.5 GHz plus 2.1 GHz supplemental uplink solution to deliver continuous 100-megabits-per-second uplink coverage in key areas. In a 34-kilometer drive test with seven third-party media outlets, peak uplink reached 1 gigabit per second and average uplink was 397 megabits per second. Coverage above 300 megabits per second reached 72% of the route, and edge-poor points below 20 megabits per second totaled 0.1%. China Unicom Vice President Miao Shouye and Huawei Wireless TDD Product Line President Li Jie framed the network as infrastructure for on-device AI, including AI phones, AI glasses, industrial vision and drone communications. |
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