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Alibaba Group Holding is paving the way for a listing of its wholly owned chip design unit T-Head, as a renewed frenzy to fund semiconductor development in China gathers pace, Bloomberg reported. T-Head, founded in 2018, is set to be first restructured into a separate business partly held by employees, followed by Alibaba exploring an initial public offering (IPO), Bloomberg reported citing sources, adding that the timing remained unclear. Alibaba owns the Post. Alibaba's US-listed American......

Baidu on Thursday unveiled Ernie 5.0, a multimodal artificial intelligence model with 2.4 trillion parameters, as use of the Chinese tech giant's AI-powered namesake assistant climbed to 200 million monthly active users. The omni-modal foundation model, capable of processing text, images, audio and video, is the Beijing-based company's most advanced to date. The model was first previewed in November and has since climbed the rankings. A leaderboard published last week by LMArena showed......

China has kicked off construction on the southern section of the Tibet-Guangdong ultra-high-voltage power transmission line, an ambitious scheme to channel vast amounts of green energy generated high in the mountains of western China to factory hubs along the country's south coast. The project – which will shoot the equivalent of half the electricity produced by the Three Gorges Dam across China each year – comes as Beijing strives to push forward with its carbon-reduction plans and keep up with......

Complaints against Hong Kong property agents jumped 56 per cent in 2025, outpacing the rise in property transactions, as a reviving housing market exposed pressure points in industry practices, according to the Estate Agents Authority (EAA). The EAA said it opened 253 complaint cases in 2025, up from 162 in 2024, even as overall residential transactions rose 18.3 per cent year on year. The faster growth in complaints suggests tensions between agents and consumers intensified more sharply than......

Moore Threads, one of China's artificial intelligence chip champions, expects to report a tripling of revenue for 2025, reflecting how local semiconductor firms are expanding rapidly amid Beijing's push for self-sufficiency. The company, founded in 2020 by Nvidia's former China head Zhang Jianzhong, said it expected revenue to land between 1.45 billion yuan (US$208 million) and 1.52 billion yuan after surging between 231 per cent and 247 per cent compared with 2024, according to a stock exchange......

Hong Kong health and beauty retailer AS Watson Group, owner of the iconic Watsons brand, is intensifying its focus on key growth areas, particularly instant retail and community stores in mainland China, as the company explores strategies to “enhance long-term value for shareholders”. The retail arm of conglomerate CK Hutchison, Watsons had accelerated its expansion in mainland China by increasing the number of physical stores and boosting online sales in response to shifting market dynamics,......

China's “infrastructure first” approach to developing its artificial intelligence industry will help unlock frontier innovation in the fast-moving technology, according to the president of Kimi model developer Moonshot AI. The country's energy buildout had made the supply of electricity “very cheap”, which was essential for fundamental research and innovation, said Moonshot's Zhang Yutong in Wednesday's panel discussion on China's “AI Plus” strategy at the World Economic Forum in Davos,......

US tech giant Apple is offering discounts of up to 1,000 yuan (US$144) on selected products to customers in mainland China, the latest promotion from the iPhone maker ahead of an expected holiday shopping wave and heightened competition from local rivals. Promoted as a limited-time Lunar New Year offer, Apple said buyers of iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus from its mainland China website and official stores between January 24 and 27 would receive the discounts, which also applied to some MacBook,......

Chinese AI companies wanting high-performance artificial intelligence chips from Nvidia are facing a dilemma: source them from the black market at much higher prices, or accept lower performance domestic alternatives from the likes of Huawei Technologies. That is because Chinese customs officials are currently holding Nvidia's H200 chips at the border, despite Washington granting approval for the US company to ship its second most advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) to China, according to......

Jeffrey Ding is an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University. He is the author of Technology and the Rise of Great Powers, an award-winning book exploring the impact of technology on geopolitical competition, as well as the founder of the ChinAI newsletter, which tracks developments in China's artificial intelligence (AI) industry. In this interview, Ding explains why “diffusion”, not innovation, will determine whether China or the US will prevail in the AI race,......

Hong Kong is testing purpose-built student housing as an alternative land-sale model, as weak demand for commercial sites pushes the government to explore uses that can still attract investor interest. The Development Bureau on Tuesday invited expressions of interest (EOI) for student hostel development on three commercially zoned sites in Kai Tak, Siu Lek Yuen in Sha Tin, and Tung Chung East, marking the first time the government had proposed selling land through open tender with use restricted......

Banks do not usually build space assets, but in China, lenders are increasingly leasing satellites, funding rocket firms and even launching spacecraft of their own. While banks elsewhere typically use satellite imagery as a purchased “alternative data” feed – for everything from monitoring crops and supply chains to assessing climate and credit risks – Chinese lenders are going further by putting satellites into orbit under their own names. China Merchants Bank (CMB) launched a satellite on......

Hong Kong stocks rose on Thursday, tracking a global rebound in risk assets, as geopolitical tensions blew over after the US rescinded the tariff threat against Europe and a sell-off in Japanese bonds came to a tentative halt. The Hang Seng Index rose 0.4 per cent to 26,691.28 as of 9.41am local time. The Hang Seng Tech Index gained 0.2 per cent. On the mainland, the CSI 300 Index climbed 0.5 per cent and the Shanghai Composite Index added 0.4 per cent. Sentiment improved after US President......

China is stepping up efforts to strengthen its influence in the pricing of global non-ferrous metals, rolling out measures to deepen market activity and tightening links between futures, spot and derivatives trading. Authorities in Shanghai, the mainland's financial hub, on Tuesday rolled out an action plan aimed at strengthening the links between the futures, spot and derivatives markets for non-ferrous metals. It is part of a broader ambition to enhance Shanghai's role in global commodity......

China could see its first flying car begin carrying paying passengers in 2026, as government backing and a growing pipeline of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicle makers push the country's “low-altitude economy” closer to commercial reality. Seven eVTOL manufacturers were expected to start delivering products before the end of this year, according to CCID Consulting. Local governments including Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chongqing are also preparing to loosen rules around......

New Google research into DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud's artificial intelligence models has found that powerful reasoning models capable of “thinking” demonstrated internal cognition resembling the mechanisms underpinning human collective intelligence. The findings published on Thursday suggested that perspective diversity, not just computational scale, was responsible for the increasing “intelligence” of AI models, while also underscoring the growing importance of Chinese open models for......

Frontier research lab MiroMind, a subsidiary of the China-founded multinational firm Shanda Group, has asked some of its staff in Shanghai to relocate to Singapore, according to people with knowledge of the matter, raising comparisons to artificial intelligence start-up Manus' pull-out from China last year. Those actions came amid Sunday's reorganisation announcement by Shanda and Singapore-based MiroMind, which said its research on artificial general intelligence (AGI) and fundamental......

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos....

The municipal government of Shanghai will open “free-to-fly” zones in the city for drones from February 1, as part of streamlined regulations designed to support the country's development of a low-altitude economy. According to Shanghai's new guidelines for civil unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), consumer drones will be allowed to fly in certain “suitable airspace” in the city without prior declaration, provided these devices are registered. These include UAVs categorised as micro, light and......

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) issued requirements on Wednesday for banks to improve their services for elderly customers, as the proportion of the city's population over the age of 65 increases rapidly. Banks will be required to upgrade their apps to meet the needs of elderly customers, improve branch facilities and ensure that staff members provide appropriate advice on investments, insurance and pension products. “As Hong Kong faces an ageing population, we expect more elderly......