--- date: 2026-10-08 subject: "Cobalt-free cathode design | Domestic deep-sea robots | XPeng opens robotaxi rides" --- **Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers stabilized** a cobalt-free, high-nickel battery cathode by doping it with trace elements, and it kept 82.4% of its capacity after 350 fast-charge cycles. **Shandong Future Robot and Harbin Institute of Technology (Weihai) sent** two deep-sea robots toward field trials in the South China Sea; the company says more than 10,000 of their components are made in China. **Guangzhou automaker XPeng launched a mini program** that will open its XPENG YOYO robotaxi service, tested only by employees since July, to public riders holding invitation codes. **Tianwan nuclear plant's Unit 7 connected** to Jiangsu's grid, and China National Nuclear Corp. says the 1,265-megawatt China-Russia reactor should enter commercial operation this year. # Top Stories - **Chinese Academy of Sciences team stabilizes cobalt-free battery cathode for fast charging** — A team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Metal Research doped a cobalt-free, high-nickel battery cathode with traces of four elements, keeping 82.4% of its capacity after 350 fast-charge cycles. Cobalt is a costly, supply-constrained metal used in cathodes, a battery's positive electrode, and cathodes made without it have struggled to stay stable under fast charging. The researchers picked magnesium and calcium because they ease the movement of lithium ions, and titanium and zirconium because they bond strongly to oxygen, holding the crystal together through repeated cycling. The tests ran at a 10C rate, a full charge in about six minutes, and the work appears in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Synthesis. [Science and Technology Daily](https://epaper.stdaily.com/statics/technology-site/index.html#/home?isDetail=1¤tNewsId=acf455b7df5a4f2b91943782a73251bf¤tVersionName=02%C2%B7%E7%AC%AC02%E7%89%88%EF%BC%9A%E8%A6%81%20%E9%97%BB¤tVersion=2&timeValue=2026-10-08) [state media] [CCTV](https://www.stdaily.com/web/gdxw/2026-10/02/content_591349.html) - **Chinese team sends deep-sea work robots it says are fully domestic to South China Sea** — Shandong Future Robot and its partner Harbin Institute of Technology (Weihai) sent two deep-sea work robots, the VY150 and VY250, from Weihai port toward field trials in the South China Sea on September 28. Uncrewed robots of this class, piloted from the surface, do the labor of offshore exploration, pipeline inspection and seabed sampling, and a fully domestic pair would let Chinese operators do it without foreign machines. Rated to work at 4,500 meters, where water presses down at roughly 450 kilograms on every square centimeter, each carries a seven-axis hydraulic arm with close to a human arm's range of motion. The company says the more than 10,000 components in every robot are made in China, and project R&D lead Tao Zewen told CCTV that their core hardware and software are fully domestic. [Science and Technology Daily](https://epaper.stdaily.com/statics/technology-site/index.html#/home?isDetail=1¤tNewsId=908413b2585f41578b37dd22ecb387da¤tVersionName=02%C2%B7%E7%AC%AC02%E7%89%88%EF%BC%9A%E8%A6%81%20%E9%97%BB¤tVersion=2&timeValue=2026-10-08) [state media] - **XPeng opens its in-house robotaxi to invited public riders through a new mini program** — Guangzhou electric vehicle maker XPeng launched a ride-hailing mini program, a lightweight app that runs inside a host platform, for its robotaxi service, now branded XPENG YOYO, and will open it to the public through invitation codes, Sina Tech reports. Opening it to outside riders takes the service beyond the employee-only testing XPeng began in July, in a car that runs on the company's own chips and AI model without lidar laser sensors or high-precision maps. XPeng says it is China's first fully self-developed, factory-built robotaxi and that its four in-house Turing chips deliver 3,000 TOPS (trillion operations per second), the most computing power of any car. In August, Guangzhou authorized XPeng to road-test the cars with nobody in the driver's seat on designated test roads. [Sina Tech](https://finance.sina.com.cn/tob/2026-10-08/doc-iniunrrp3943183.shtml) - **Seventh reactor at China's Tianwan nuclear plant connects to the grid** — Unit 7 of the Tianwan Nuclear Power Plant in Jiangsu province sent its first electricity into the grid, said China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC), the state-owned group that builds and runs nuclear plants. Rated at 1,265 megawatts and expected to generate nearly 10 billion kilowatt-hours a year, the third-generation reactor adds round-the-clock power to Jiangsu's grid that does not depend on weather or on burning coal. Units 7 and 8 are a China-Russia project that ITHome calls the two countries' largest nuclear energy cooperation to date. Zhang Yi, chairman of CNNC's Jiangsu Nuclear Power Co., said Unit 7 should enter commercial operation this year, and Unit 8 is scheduled to follow in 2027. [Global Times](https://china.huanqiu.com/article/4TWliMfqyOu) [state media] [ITHome](https://www.ithome.com/1/010/577.htm) # Chips & Semiconductors - **Auto electronics firm Guochuang builds stability control prototype using only Chinese chips** — Guochuang Domain Control, incubated by a state-backed electric vehicle research center, finished a validation prototype of an electronic stability control (ESC) unit built entirely on domestic chips, EV Industry Supply Chain reports. ESC is the braking system that stops a car from skidding, so the unit puts Chinese chips in a part where a failure directly affects safety, though still as a prototype. It meets ASIL D, the strictest safety grade under the international ISO 26262 automotive standard, and China's GB 44495 vehicle cybersecurity standard, Gasgoo reports. Guochuang expects capacity of 500,000 units a year once the controller reaches mass production, and its all-domestic-chip central gateway has been in mass production at a commercial vehicle maker for three years. [EV Industry Supply Chain](https://www.evchanye.com/2026/1008/53231.shtml) [Gasgoo](https://i.gasgoo.com/news/70473907.html) - **Investor-hotline staffer at laser chip maker Everbright says possible U.S. optical module curbs have no near-term impact** — An investor-hotline staffer at Suzhou Everbright Photonics told National Business Daily that possible U.S. curbs on Chinese optical modules, flagged in a Morgan Stanley note, would have no material short-term impact on China's optical chip industry. China supplies more than 60% of the world's optical transceiver modules, which carry data as light between AI data center servers. A full ban could leave U.S. cloud companies short of parts, Taiwan's Economic Daily News reports. Curbs by the Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. telecom regulator, would start with the 3.2-terabit generation, not expected to ship in volume until 2028, per Morgan Stanley. The staffer added that the note is not a formal document and that today's market runs on 800-gigabit and 1.6-terabit modules. [Yicai](https://www.yicai.com/brief/103386180.html) [state-affiliated] [Economic Daily News](https://money.udn.com/money/story/5612/9791710?from=edn_related_storybottom) # Digital Infrastructure - **Huawei engineers show experimental file system that pools memory across servers** — Huawei engineers presented XMFS, an experimental Linux file system for servers that can address one another's memory directly, at the Linux Plumbers Conference in the Czech Republic, CnBeta reports. Because applications reach that pooled memory through POSIX, the standard file commands Unix-style programs already use, software written for one server could run across Huawei's UnifiedBus clusters without being rewritten. XMFS supports Huawei's own UnifiedBus interconnect and the industry standard CXL 3.0, and it beat TMPFS, the standard Linux file system that keeps files in one machine's memory, in conference benchmarks. Huawei has validated it for sharing container images across servers and for metadata-heavy jobs, though it has not yet been submitted for Linux kernel review. [CnBeta](https://www.cnbeta.com.tw/articles/tech/1581178.htm)