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Bottom Line Up Front Huawei open-sources a 505-billion-parameter model it says was trained on its own Ascend AI chips, publishing the weights, basic inference code and a technical report for openPangu-2.0-Pro on July 31. NDRC sizes China's five-year compute buildout at 4 trillion yuan ($560 billion) in direct investment over the 15th Five-Year Plan, and says corporate investment leads it, leaving large room for private capital. BeiDou completed an in-orbit upgrade across its 50 operating satellites, adding resistance to jamming. BeiDou is the domestic counterpart to the U.S. Global Positioning System. |
| Huawei open-sources a 505-billion-parameter model it says was trained on its own AI chips Huawei said on July 31 that it had open-sourced openPangu-2.0-Pro, publishing the model weights, basic inference code and a technical report. Weights are the trained parameters that define a model, so publishing them lets others run and adapt the system on their own hardware. Huawei says the model was trained on Ascend neural processing units, its own line of AI accelerator chips. The model uses a mixture-of-experts design with about 505 billion total parameters, of which about 18 billion are used for any given token of text. Mixture-of-experts routes each token to a small subset of the network, which cuts the compute needed per token. Huawei says the model supports a 512,000-token context window, roughly the length of several full-length books, and was trained on about 34 trillion tokens of data, where a token is roughly a word fragment. |
| State planner sizes China's five-year compute buildout at 4 trillion yuan and calls it corporate-led Jiang Yi, who directs the policy research office at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), gave the figure at a July 31 briefing. The NDRC drafts China's five-year plans and screens major investment projects, so its estimates set expectations for provincial governments and state firms. Jiang said institutions estimate the compute buildout will add 4 trillion yuan ($560 billion) in direct investment during the 15th Five-Year Plan, the current national planning cycle. He said corporate investment leads the buildout and leaves large room for private capital, and that the commission will strengthen planning guidance and guarantees for production inputs. Jiang said China's first fully domestic 100,000-card AI super-cluster is now in operation, a cluster built on domestically produced accelerator chips rather than imported ones. He put global downloads of Chinese large language models above 10 billion and the number of high-quality Chinese datasets above 120,000. |
| BeiDou finishes a software upgrade of satellites already in orbit, adding jamming resistance The China Satellite Navigation Office said on July 31 that the BeiDou system had fully completed the upgrade. BeiDou is the domestic counterpart to the U.S. Global Positioning System. An in-orbit upgrade means new software was loaded onto satellites already flying. The upgrade was announced in March and focused on transmission efficiency across inter-satellite links, signal acquisition in complex environments and resistance to jamming, meaning deliberate radio interference intended to deny the signal. ITHome reported that the work makes BeiDou the first global navigation satellite system able to be redefined in software at scale while in orbit. The system's published performance rests on 50 satellites in operating orbit, with global positioning accuracy stated at better than 10 meters. BeiDou-3 chief designer Xie Jun said China is planning a next-generation system aimed at decimeter and even centimeter positioning. |
| MIIT creates the committee that will write China's quantum technology standards The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which sets China's industry technical standards, held the founding meeting of its Quantum Information Standardization Technical Committee in Beijing on July 30. A standards committee sets the test methods, terminology and interfaces that products in its field are measured against. The committee's secretariat sits at the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), the ministry's own research academy. Its remit covers standards for quantum computing, quantum communication and quantum precision measurement, plus basic and common technologies. Quantum precision measurement uses quantum effects to build clocks, gravity sensors and navigation instruments more accurate than classical designs. Quantum communication distributes encryption keys in single photons, so interception disturbs the signal and can be detected. |
| Shenzhen targets 45% of city output from strategic emerging industries by 2030 The General Offices of Shenzhen's Communist Party committee and municipal government jointly issued the plan, which the city calls version 3.0 of its numbered industrial clusters program. Shenzhen's 2026 government work report put 2025 strategic emerging industry value added at 1.67 trillion yuan ($230 billion), or 43.0% of city output, so the target is a two-point step up. That report's new tracks include the low-altitude economy, aerospace information and biopharmaceuticals, while its designated future industries include sixth-generation mobile communication, quantum technology and brain-computer interfaces. Low-altitude economy is China's policy category for commercial drone and short-range aircraft activity. Shenzhen also calls for more than 10,000 innovation and industrial investment funds with combined scale above 1 trillion yuan ($140 billion). |
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| China's trade council asks the EU to delete or substantially revise country-targeted rules in two draft laws Yang Fan, spokesperson for the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT), made the request at its July press conference. CCPIT is the official body that represents Chinese companies in trade matters abroad. He was answering a question about the EU's draft Cybersecurity Act amendment and the Industrial Accelerator Act. Yang said the cybersecurity draft would exclude products and services from high-risk suppliers across 18 critical sectors, among them information and communications, energy and transport. High-risk supplier is a regulatory label that bars a named vendor's equipment from designated networks regardless of whether a specific fault is found. Yang said Chinese business groups regard the measures as exceeding what security requires and as conflicting with World Trade Organization rules, and asked the EU to delete or substantially revise the country-targeted and discriminatory provisions. |
| FCC says its new robot restrictions cover robot vacuums, a category Chinese brands lead Robot vacuums fall within the equipment restrictions the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced on July 29, media relations director Katie Gorscak confirmed to U.S. media. The FCC added foreign-made advanced robotic devices and connected inverters to its Covered List, the register of equipment barred from new device authorizations on security grounds. A device qualifies if it is software-controlled, senses its surroundings, travels on the ground, has wireless connectivity and weighs over 2 kilograms with its base. Roborock ranks first in global smart robot vacuum share at 27%, followed by Ecovacs and Dreame, also Chinese brands. DJI has formally challenged a December 2025 FCC restriction on foreign-made drones, saying it lacks evidentiary support and functions as protectionism. Any new robot vacuum model seeking U.S. authorization must clear an exemption requiring at least 65% of components to originate domestically. |
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| III | AI & FOUNDATION MODELS | |
| DeepSeek puts the finished V4-Flash into public beta with scores concentrated on agent tasks DeepSeek opened public beta access to the official version of V4-Flash through its programming interface on July 31. The company said the architecture and size are unchanged from the earlier V4-Flash preview and that only post-training was redone, the stage where a model is tuned to follow instructions and use tools. Per DeepSeek's changelog, the model scored 82.7 on Terminal Bench 2.1, a test of completing tasks in a command-line environment. V4-Flash uses about 13 billion of its 284 billion parameters for any given token, against 49 billion of 1.6 trillion for the larger V4-Pro. DeepSeek also named its in-house agent framework, Harness, for the first time, saying the published benchmarks were run in its minimalist mode. The company said the official version of V4-Pro will follow as soon as possible. |
| MiniMax releases H3, a video model that generates picture and sound together MiniMax released H3, its first open-source multimodal generative model, on July 31. The model produces picture and sound in one pass, which removes the separate sound-design step most video models still require. MiniMax says H3 outputs 2K resolution directly, roughly 2,000 pixels wide, and generates up to 15 seconds of audio-visual content with two-channel stereo audio. The company says H3 ranks first globally for video-editing capability on the leaderboard run by Artificial Analysis, an independent model performance tracker. MiniMax prices H3 video generation at 0.8 yuan per second (about $0.11) and says that is one-third of comparable flagship models. It said it plans to publish H3's weights within days so enterprises can run the model on their own hardware. |
| ByteDance ships Seedance 2.5 in China, two weeks after opening the model's international API ByteDance released the video generation model Seedance 2.5 on July 31 on its Jimeng AI service and the professional edition of its Doubao assistant, with access through its Volcano Ark cloud platform to follow; the model's API opened on the company's international BytePlus platform on July 16. The domestic launch ran late against June 23 guidance of early July. ByteDance says the model generates a full 30-second video in a single continuous pass, against eight seconds per native pass for Google's Veo 3.1. Caixin says the earlier Seedance 2.0 absorbed the share left when OpenAI shut down Sora 2 and was widely adopted by China's short-drama industry. ByteDance said the share of Seedance 2.0's interface calls coming from outside China rose from one-third to one-half by the end of June. |
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| Display maker TCL CSOT says glass-based chip packaging samples will appear in the second half TCL CSOT chief executive Zhao Jun said the company is at the technology validation and early development stage on glass-based semiconductor packaging. He spoke at the 2026 ChinaJoy expo, answering a question about whether the panel maker would move into chip packaging. Advanced packaging assembles finished chips into a working module, and the glass version uses a glass sheet instead of organic resin as the base. Zhao said panel making and advanced packaging share steps including large glass substrate handling, thin-film deposition and lithography. He listed unresolved bottlenecks in copper filling of through-glass vias, the vertical holes drilled through the glass and filled with metal to carry signals. Zhao said TCL CSOT expects to show samples in the second half of 2026 and will begin preparations for a pilot-line development platform. |
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| V | ROBOTICS & AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS | |
| Battery ceiling holds mainstream humanoid robots to two to four hours per charge Mainstream mass-produced humanoid robots worldwide typically run two to four hours per charge and carry under 2 kilowatt-hours of battery, roughly one-fortieth of a mid-range electric car pack, per market researcher TrendForce. Xu Wei, general manager of Junen New Energy, the battery unit of automotive supplier Joyson Electronics, told Securities Times that short runtime and safety are the industry's two core constraints. Humanoid joints have no self-locking function, so hip and knee joints must draw 200 to 300 watts continuously to hold a standing posture. Unitree's H1 carries 0.864 kilowatt-hours and runs under four hours standing still, while Tesla's Optimus Gen2 carries 2.3 kilowatt-hours and sustains about two hours of moving operation. AgiBot's Yuanzheng A3 uses a dual-pack design the company says reaches 10 hours of operation with 10-second swaps. |
| BYD will show its first humanoid robot in early August, aimed at its own dealerships BYD, China's largest electric vehicle maker, will publicly unveil its first humanoid robot in early August at its Di Space showroom in Zhengzhou. The venue's account posted a teaser image on July 25 showing a humanoid silhouette, captioned that a new friend wanted to meet visitors. BYD Group executive vice president Li Ke confirmed in May that the company is developing a humanoid, and said its automotive motor, battery and control technologies transfer to robots. Li said BYD plans to place two to three robots in every dealership storefront to greet customers and run in-car demonstrations, and predicted mass rollout within one to two years. BYD denied circulating claims that the machine is a seventh-generation prototype or that 20,000 units will be deployed this year, saying those figures do not match actual progress. |
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| Wuhan completes a citywide drone monitoring network with 146 unattended airports The Wuhan Surveying and Mapping Research Institute and DJI Enterprise Applications, the industrial arm of the drone maker, released results on July 29 from the city's low-altitude monitoring network, called Smart Urban Eye. Wuhan has built 146 unattended drone airports, meaning docking stations that launch, recover, recharge and shelter aircraft with no operator on site. The city says the network gives roughly five-minute drone response outside no-fly zones. The 146 airports are shared across municipal departments and dispatched from one platform, with each department keeping its own data and access permissions. That shared design avoids duplicate construction of parallel fleets. The system now serves 16 city departments. Since deployment began in August 2025, drones have taken part in handling 400 traffic accidents on elevated roads, with about 30% resolved by remote guidance. |
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