--- date: 2026-10-09 subject: "Biren powers on next-gen GPU | Zijing ships 10 million car chips | Robotera tops robot AI board" --- **Biren Technology says its next-generation GPU powered on** today and passed boot testing, putting the Chinese AI chip designer a step closer to a chip that Mydrivers reports is expected to outperform Nvidia's H200. **Huawei is weighing a gradual global launch of HarmonyOS**, its in-house phone operating system, consumer devices chief Richard Yu said in interview minutes released Tuesday, calling it a preliminary plan with no timetable given. **Tsinghua spin-off Robotera says its VPP2 robot AI model** averaged, by the company's figures, a 32.26% success rate on the RoboDojo simulation leaderboard against 22.48% for GPT-6-Astra. **Great Wall Motor's chip unit Zijing has shipped** more than 10 million car-grade chips, and its flagship product is what it calls China's first automotive microcontroller built on the open-source RISC-V standard. # Top Stories - **Chinese GPU designer Biren says next-generation chip has powered on, designed to replace Nvidia's H200** — Biren Technology, a designer of the graphics processors (GPUs) used to train and run AI models, said today its next-generation GPU has powered on and passed boot testing. Power-on is when a design first runs as physical silicon, which leaves post-silicon validation and volume production ahead. Mydrivers links the chip to the BR20X series, which Biren said early this year it was developing on its next-generation architecture and which is expected to outperform Nvidia's H200 data center chip. About 70% of the roughly HK$4.02 billion ($520 million) in net proceeds from a newly agreed share placement will go toward that commercial rollout. Biren expects customer sampling and volume production within the coming quarters. [Mydrivers](https://m.mydrivers.com/newsview/1156269.html) - **Huawei weighs taking its HarmonyOS phone operating system to global markets** — Huawei is considering gradually taking HarmonyOS, its in-house operating system for phones and other devices, to global markets, consumer devices chief Richard Yu said in interview minutes released Tuesday. Android and iOS run nearly every phone sold outside China, so a launch abroad would offer a Chinese-controlled alternative there. Yu called it a preliminary plan, and TMTPost notes he gave no timetable. Huawei's phone business has been severely affected since 2019, Yu said, and it now sells only a few million phones a year outside China. [TMTPost](https://www.tmtpost.com/8161766.html) - **Tsinghua spin-off Robotera says its robot AI model tops simulation leaderboard over GPT-6-Astra** — Robotera, a robotics company spun off from Tsinghua University, says its VPP2 model ranks first on RoboDojo, a simulation leaderboard for robot AI. A shared leaderboard scores models from different labs on the same tasks, and by Robotera's figures VPP2 averaged a 32.26% success rate against 22.48% for GPT-6-Astra. VPP2 is a world action model, which predicts how a scene will change and turns that prediction into robot movement. On a real two-arm robot given tasks it had not been trained on, such as folding and pouring, it beat Physical Intelligence's pi0.5 in nine of 10, the company reports. Robotera has open-sourced the code, which builds on Alibaba's open-source Wan2.1 video model. [36Kr](https://www.36kr.com/p/4018046813065349) - **Great Wall Motor chip unit Zijing ships more than 10 million car-grade chips** — Zijing Semiconductor, a Great Wall Motor chip unit, has shipped more than 10 million car-grade chips, the most notable being what it calls China's first automotive microcontroller (MCU) built on the open-source RISC-V standard. China builds about 70% of the world's cars while domestic chips hold just over 10% of the car chip market, strategy chief Xu Xingkui said. The shipments put one local supplier into that gap at volume. An MCU is a small chip that runs a single function, and RISC-V is a processor design anyone can use without paying license fees. The M100 MCU has run headlights and switches since entering mass production in December 2025, and Zijing says it is domestic from design through packaging. [Gasgoo](https://auto.gasgoo.com/news/202610/8I70474252C601.shtml) # Robotics & Autonomous Systems - **Beijing AI firm's platform delivers 1.5 million hours of human video for robot training** — An AI company in Beijing's Zhongguancun tech district says its data platform has delivered 1.5 million hours of video of people doing tasks, pooled with simulated data from robot training grounds nationwide. AI models that control robots learn from large volumes of real manipulation data, which, unlike text, cannot be scraped from the internet. More than 70 training grounds, facilities where robots practice tasks while their movements are recorded, were operating at the end of June. In Shenzhen, a wheeled humanoid robot trained on such data can open switch cabinets and industrial valves on its own. An industry standard on the quality of robot training datasets takes effect Nov. 1. [EV Industry Technology](https://www.evchanye.com/2026/1009/53450.shtml) [Xinhua](https://www.news.cn/tech/20260921/063d149472224524bf24d3d253c83cd2/c.html) [state media] # Quantum & Science - **Chinese theorist and partner labs report first observation of topological states at a phase transition** — Yu Xuejia of the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, and collaborating experimental teams report in two Nature papers the first observation of topological states, wave patterns protected against defects, at a phase transition. Physicists had linked such states to an energy gap, which closes when a material changes phase, so the result widens where these protected states can occur. The experiments used acoustic metamaterials, engineered structures that steer sound the way some materials steer electrons, and edge states running along their boundaries stayed stable after the gap fully closed. The experimental teams came from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University and the University of Science and Technology of China.[S&T Daily](https://epaper.stdaily.com/statics/technology-site/index.html#/home?isDetail=1¤tNewsId=18c6ac0004754526ad129d5ef0970041¤tVersionName=01%C2%B7%E7%AC%AC01%E7%89%88%EF%BC%9A%E4%BB%8A%E6%97%A5%E8%A6%81%E9%97%BB¤tVersion=1&timeValue=2026-10-09) [state media] - **Salt-tolerant soybean line sets yield record on salty Shandong farmland** — Guochuangdou 78, a soybean line bred for salt-alkali soil, yielded 404.85 kilograms per mu (about 6,070 kilograms per hectare) in an expert field measurement in Dongying, Shandong. China imports more than 80% of its soybeans, chief scientist Tian Zhixi said. A line that yields well on soil too salty for most crops adds growing area without displacing other harvests. The result tops the line's own 2025 mark of 369.15 kilograms per mu, already a domestic record for salt-alkali land. Yazhouwan National Laboratory led the work using molecular design breeding, which relies on genetic markers to assemble desired traits. The plant carries several branches, short stem segments between leaves and dense pods. [S&T Daily](https://epaper.stdaily.com/statics/technology-site/index.html#/home?isDetail=1¤tNewsId=95aaedc0e7c1444998e23795f75d0fb9¤tVersionName=02%C2%B7%E7%AC%AC02%E7%89%88%EF%BC%9A%E8%A6%81%20%E9%97%BB¤tVersion=2&timeValue=2026-10-09) [state media] # Military Watch - **Chinese navy aviation unit uses laser robot dog and drones in runway-repair drill** — A Chinese navy aviation unit used a laser-armed robot dog to find unexploded ordnance on its runway and burn it with a laser during a drill simulating an air strike. How fast a damaged runway is cleared decides when an air base can launch aircraft again, and the drill handed the most dangerous step to machines. The unit belongs to the navy of the Southern Theater Command, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) headquarters for southern China and the South China Sea. Mapping drones surveyed four craters and built a 3D damage model, which on-site commander Zhang Haoyang said is several times faster than surveying by hand. Driverless vehicles then hauled away explosives that could not be destroyed in place. [S&T Daily](https://epaper.stdaily.com/statics/technology-site/index.html#/home?isDetail=1¤tNewsId=dd7c3ad04a8c4c859f0bbf34eadf4a86¤tVersionName=06%C2%B7%E7%AC%AC06%E7%89%88%EF%BC%9A%E5%86%9B%20%E4%BA%8B¤tVersion=6&timeValue=2026-10-09) [state media] # Digital Infrastructure - **Guangzhou grid project installs transformer state media call world's largest by capacity** — Crews in central Guangzhou installed a 770 megavolt-ampere flexible direct current (DC) transformer, which state media call the world's largest by capacity, at a project linking three of the city's power supply zones. Flexible DC lets one zone send power to another within milliseconds, so a shortfall in one part of the city can be covered before it becomes an outage. Its capacity could slow-charge about 100,000 electric vehicles at once, by state media's count. In the dense city center, the equipment is stacked vertically inside a converter station, the facility that switches power between alternating and direct current. State media say every component is domestically made, and the finished project will add supply for about 350,000 households. [Global Times](https://china.huanqiu.com/article/4TXZuTaOW5E) [state media]