Can China fund its AI ambitions? Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt casts doubt

South China Morning Post - Dec 4, 2025

China’s designs on supremacy in artificial intelligence could be hindered by a funding gap in the sector, according to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who gave a grim assessment of the country’s AI prospects as China and the US lock horns for dominance. However, analysts said that funding would not be a concern for China’s AI development given the deep pockets of the country’s private and state investors – particularly as Beijing, Big Tech firms and investors were united in their determination...

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While few dispute that China is narrowing the gap with the United States in developing artificial intelligence (AI) models, there is one area where Chinese firms are already the undisputed leaders: video. China has seen a proliferation of advanced generative AI video models – systems trained on visual data to generate or edit video content based on user inputs such as text prompts, images and audio. The country’s vast short-video ecosystems and looser copyright rules have helped give Chinese...

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Nvidia’s Jensen Huang brings ‘sovereign AI’ push to Kazakhstan, shrugs off bubble fears

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is pitching the concept of “sovereign AI” in Kazakhstan – part of his global crusade urging nations to build domestic computing infrastructure using the firm’s chips – as the energy-rich nation emerges as a US-China battleground for artificial intelligence. Speaking at a fireside chat in Astana on Friday with Kazakh AI and digital development minister Zhaslan Madiyev, Huang said AI was reshaping every industry in a transformation that “affects every single person and...

China’s humanoid robots hunt for work in South Korea as Seoul bets on physical AI

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This article was first published by The Korea Times in a partnership with the South China Morning Post. Chinese humanoid robot makers are accelerating efforts to gain a foothold in South Korea, moving beyond dance performances and showroom displays to factory trials and commercial deployments, as Seoul ramps up investment in physical artificial intelligence. A growing number of Chinese robotics companies – including Hong Kong-listed UBTech Robotics, start-up Anyverse Dynamics, Shanghai-based...

Unitree developing AI system to let humanoid robots improve themselves

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China’s Unitree unveils ‘guardian’ robot that can disarm attackers, lift cars

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A knife-wielding intruder is confronted. A car is lifted to free a trapped victim. A pedestrian is pulled from the path of an oncoming vehicle. The scenes described are not from a Hollywood blockbuster, but a promotional clip for a new “guardian” robot created by the Chinese technology firm Unitree Robotics. The footage for the H2-X model, released on Wednesday, underscores a wider shift in strategy by the Hangzhou-based firm, as it focuses on finding practical, real-world uses for its athletic...

Meta to pay New Mexico a historic US$25 billion in Cambridge Analytica Facebook case

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Tesla has agreed a deal to integrate Chinese fintech giant Ant Group’s Alipay digital payment software into its vehicles in China, as Elon Musk’s firm steps up efforts to offer localised smart features amid intense competition in the Chinese market. The agreement, signed on Tuesday, will see Tesla roll out an Alipay-powered smart parking service across its Chinese fleet, according to the fintech firm. Neither side revealed a launch date or which car models would receive the feature, though...

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Nvidia CEO to deliver keynote speech in Berlin as his firm faces investor scrutiny over AI

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Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek has fully open-sourced an internally developed framework designed to run AI models efficiently, as a senior researcher at the company described the growing divide between open-source and closed-source AI as a battle between “light and darkness”. The company on Tuesday released DeepInfer, an inference framework tailored to support its DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash model on both Nvidia’s SM100 Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) and Huawei...

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