Fellow at @BrookingsInst China tech: AI, chips, robotics, EVs, clean energy High Capacity newsletter & podcast: https://xitter-newx.xyz-mikolabs.workers.dev/t.co/D6k0b2dJgZ
Washington, DC
Joined November 2010
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China. AI. Tech. Geopolitics.
17,000 subscribers.
Newsletter: highcapacity.org
Podcast: youtube.com/@highcapacitypod…
Great report on China’s military and robotics. My top two takeaways:
1. Lots of experimentation with different forms and applications
2. Less focused on humanoids and way more focused on quadrupeds
Yes this fits the pattern better.
The “Chinese spy” story makes it sound like she was a professional covert agent from the start.
But then why would she be posting photos of herself with Jensen on WeChat and making splashy public appearances with him?
She sounds more like a commercial opportunist / “white glove” who played the game very well and got access to one of the most powerful players in the industry.
Later MSS may have wanted to learn about what she was learning about.
Normally I don’t like to speculate like this. But there’s a lot of speculation out there that leans toward one set of narratives that don’t seem to line up. So I thought it was worth at least presenting another set of possibilities.
Basically this: xitter-newx.xyz-mikolabs.workers.dev/plmattis/status/212024…
I think @DesmondShum is absolutely right about Alice Huang's business career.
Nothing seems to suggest she was actually an MSS officer.
But the MSS definitely sees value in those individuals and does make use of them, especially when aiming internationally.
This is why I hate people just saying "spy" because it can mean anyone from an intelligence officer to someone who was exploited, even loosely.
We also need to distinguish what might an intelligence matter from what is someone who is effective at hustling business.
Good input by Desmond and @steveyates
Emirates president on China challenging Boeing and Airbus:
“If anybody’s got the will to do it, the Chinese have...They’ve slaughtered the auto market with EVs, they’ve upended so many industries, why would aviation be any different for them?” bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
ByteDance, Moonshot, and MiniMax are all hiring in the US but struggle to compete for talent with American AI companies.
By @kinlinglo and @violazhouyi restofworld.org/2026/chinese…
There should be a Congressional investigation. nytimes.com/2026/11/08/techn…
China is starting to turn the corner on this, with coal power generation plateauing and basically all new power generation coming from clean energy.
But China’s world-beating coal use needs to be included in any analysis of China’s rise as a clean tech superpower.
Almost all the growth in global coal use since the late 1980s has come from China.
Outside China, the world’s use of coal has barely changed since the late 1980s. It was just over 20,000 terawatt-hours back then, and almost four decades later, it is still the same.
But the change has been very different in China. The country has increased the use of coal enormously, and today, China is burning more coal than the rest of the world combined.
The future of global coal use, and the emissions that come with it, depends heavily on what happens in China.
(written by @MaxCRoser)
Here you can see China starting to bend the curve on coal use in the past few years. From @ember_energy
ember-energy.org/data/electr…
For this massive data center, China's Envision built the:
- Wind farms
- Blade factory
- Dedicated power line
- Low-voltage power modules
- 800V solid-state transformer
- Battery storage system
- Prefabricated substation
We Visited China’s Stargate in Inner Mongolia
A wind-powered 800MW campus,
120MW built within a year,
a 5MW SST-native 800V DC pilot and a cooling design without central chillers
newsletter.semianalysis.com/…
"These days, nearly every major Chinese tech firm has its own AI models, custom chips, and robots. Instead of EV or robot companies, China now has all-in-one physical AI companies."
From my piece on China's tech Swiss Army knives: highcapacity.org/p/chinas-te…
Some of China’s most successful tech firms are renowned for their aggressive vertical integration: BYD, DJI, Unitree.
But it’s not just about costs. It’s also about greater performance and efficiency through customization and co-design.
My full piece: highcapacity.org/p/chinas-te…
"Chinese tech companies are getting stronger, evolving into full-stack physical AI generalists, even as they face growing pressure from all sides."
From my new piece on China's tech Swiss Army Knives: highcapacity.org/p/chinas-te…
Very interesting. Unitree factory uses far more manual labor than people might expect.
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🚨 NEW HIGH CAPACITY PIECE 🚨
CHINA'S TECH SWISS ARMY KNIVES
China's tech convergence and why every Chinese tech firm is building its own AI models, chips, and robots. highcapacity.org/p/chinas-te…
This is a follow-up to my previous piece on China's overlapping tech ecosystems: highcapacity.org/p/chinas-ov…
600,000 Nvidia H200 chips are reportedly piled up in Hong Kong, blocked by Beijing from import into mainland China. reuters.com/world/china/nvid…
One of my favorite examples of Chinese tech spillovers:
China doesn’t just make solar panels. It makes solar manufacturing equipment too, including equipment for slicing silicon wafers.
This wafer-slicing equipment typically uses diamond-coated wires. China also has the world’s largest synthetic diamond industry.
These capabilities also benefit China's silicon carbide (SiC) industry. SiC is one of the hardest industrial materials and requires specialized cutting equipment, often using diamond abrasives. Chinese companies like Gaoce have expanded from solar wafer-cutting equipment into SiC semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
SiC semiconductors are increasingly important in power electronics, particularly EVs, high-power industrial motor drives, and emerging solid-state transformers.
Solid-state transformers are a promising technology for managing complex power grids, especially those with lots of clean energy. As well as AI data centers.
(And now China is considering placing export controls on some of this solar manufacturing equipment)
Head of Gaoce explains how they’re moving from solar to semiconductors and SiC:
“Horizontally, we transfer capabilities across different cutting applications, for example, expanding from photovoltaics into cutting semiconductors, sapphire, magnetic materials, and silicon carbide.” cs.com.cn/ssgs/gsxw/202312/t…
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China’s new draft export controls on solar manufacturing equipment are about keeping China’s edge over other countries, including the US and South Korea, a Chinese solar expert explains.
Ironically, he says it’s about preventing global solar overcapacity:
“Lü Jinbiao said that following the introduction of export controls, older-generation silane fluidized-bed granular polysilicon projects located in the United States but acquired by South Korean companies will find it difficult to obtain China’s advanced production processes and equipment.
“For example, one project spent heavily on upgrades three years ago in an attempt to restart production, but ultimately abandoned the effort because trial production costs were too high and product quality failed to meet the requirements of high-efficiency photovoltaic cells.”
In his view, restricting exports of leading production technologies and equipment, alongside comprehensive controls on new domestic capacity, is intended to prevent indiscriminate capacity expansion worldwide from leading to disorderly competition.”
Another Chinese open-source model with data filtering for AI safety.
Tencent’s new Hy4 model excludes offensive cyber data from training data to prevent misuse, like Kimi K3.1 Pro. (Same with bio data)
Is this the new standard for strong Chinese open-source model releases going forward, particularly in light of China’s draft export controls on AI?
Xiaomi is peak Chinese tech firm.
Went from making cheap smartphones and household appliances to EVs and AI models.
Now Xiaomi is making humanoid robots that run autonomously on its own VLA model to help build its EVs.
8 hours on the production line. 🤖
Xiaomi’s full-size humanoid robot takes on an 8-hour task at the Center Console Side-Cover Sorting Workstation at Xiaomi Auto Factory.
Beyond sustained operation, it can autonomously detect and correct anomalies while coordinating with the production line system — another step toward real-world industrial deployment.
#XiaomiRobotics #EmbodiedAI
If DeepSeek does fully pre-train V5 on Huawei chips AND the model is strong, this would mark a huge milestone since the US cut Huawei off from TSMC in 2020.
DeepSeek plans to pre-train its next model, V5, on Huawei's Ascend chips, according to several people in the supply chain cited by STAR Market Daily, a Chinese financial outlet.
Bloomberg reported in early September that DeepSeek had so far relied on Nvidia accelerators for training.
I would wait for DeepSeek's own V5 report. DeepSeek's V4 technical report gives 32 to 33 trillion tokens of pre-training data. It does not specify the chips. I will count V5 as pre-trained on Ascend when that report says so.
I have no clue who follows me these days. So I asked Grok. Didn’t even realize @JeffBezos follows me.
