Companies
The players
A dated, sourced state of play for each company driving Chinese AI, built from our daily reporting. One page, the key facts with named sources, and the issues where we covered them.
DeepSeek
The open-weight efficiency lab, now designing silicon
Huawei Ascend
The domestic AI accelerator that replaced Nvidia in China
SMIC
The foundry that makes China’s leading-edge AI chips, and the bottleneck
CXMT
China’s domestic DRAM maker, and the memory the AI build-out made scarce
Cambricon
China’s first pure-play AI chip designer past a trillion yuan, and the shipments that gap the valuation
Zhipu AI
The GLM lab, and the first listed Chinese model company
Moore Threads
The domestic GPU maker, from a record IPO to triple-digit revenue growth
Biren
The blacklisted GPU designer that opened 2026’s listing window
MetaX
The AMD-founded GPU maker with the sharpest debut of the cycle
Enflame
Tencent’s AI chip bet, now listed and still dependent on one customer
Kunlunxin
Baidu’s AI chip arm, and a valuation that moved seventeenfold in seven months
Baidu Apollo Go
Baidu’s robotaxi, exporting its self-driving stack from Hong Kong to London
WeRide
The Nasdaq-listed robotaxi company exporting a driving stack, not a car
BYD
The EV giant that quietly built its own driving model and 4nm chip
Unitree
The humanoid maker every unlisted Chinese robot company is priced against
Moonshot AI
The Kimi lab that treats open weights as a licence, not a giveaway
MiniMax
The lab that gave up the consumer app and became a token wholesaler
Hygon
The x86-and-accelerator house behind a large share of China’s AI servers
Alibaba (Qwen)
The open-weight download leader, and the cloud that bills for it
Tencent (Hunyuan)
The Chinese model that moves the most tokens and the fewest headlines
ByteDance (Doubao)
The biggest AI spender in China that files nothing
Baidu (ERNIE)
Search profits funding an AI build, with the chip arm and the robotaxi spun out
Xiaomi (MiMo)
A phone company that ships an open-weight frontier model, a robot model and its own silicon
UBTech (优必选)
The listed humanoid maker selling 921 factory robots and struggling to build a consumer one
Galbot (银河通用)
The embodied-AI company whose robots already have paying industrial customers
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