China’s Z.ai revenue jumps 400% as total losses narrow on explosive cloud gains

South China Morning Post - Aug 31, 2026

Chinese artificial intelligence company Z.ai on Monday reported a 400 per cent increase in first-half revenue, driven by explosive growth in its open platform and application programming interface business, which helped narrow total losses despite higher research and development spending. Revenue for the six months ended June 30 rose to 953.89 million yuan (US$142 million). Full-year sales were expected to expand 514 per cent to 4.45 billion yuan, according to consensus estimates from analysts...

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Chinese rocket maker Galactic Energy has successfully sent its Pallas-1 medium-to-large reusable rocket into orbit, marking the latest milestone in Beijing’s drive to develop reusable launch capabilities and narrow the gap with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The two-stage, liquid-propellant rocket lifted off at 10am on Tuesday from a self-built launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre’s commercial pilot zone in northwestern China’s Gansu province before entering its designated orbit, according to...

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China’s home-grown artificial intelligence chipmakers are starting to cash in on Beijing’s self-reliance drive, but a fresh wave of first-half earnings reveals a stark divide between the industry’s rising profit stars and loss-making players. Shares of Chinese AI chipmakers traded mixed on Monday as investors digested the financial updates. MetaX Integrated Circuits saw its Shanghai-listed stock rise 2.4 per cent to 691.2 yuan on Monday after reporting a swing to profitability late on Sunday....

Sony Music, Warner accuse Anthropic of ‘blatant theft’ in major new lawsuit

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CXMT joins growing list of Chinese tech firms suing US Pentagon over blacklists

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Leading chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) has joined a growing list of Chinese technology companies suing the US government over their additions to Pentagon blacklists, as legal experts said US courts had shown a willingness to hold the Department of Defence to account. Recent rulings involving Chinese tech firms including lidar sensor maker Hesai Group, drone manufacturer DJI and biotech firm WuXi AppTec indicated that judges were prepared to scrutinise the US government’s evidence...

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China’s CXMT posts massive 870% revenue surge as ‘aggressive expansion’ pays off

Chinese chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) reported a sharp surge in first-half revenue on Friday, as the firm released its first financial results since becoming China’s most valuable publicly traded company in a blockbuster Shanghai listing last month. The Hefei-based firm – China’s leading maker of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) products – posted revenue of 150.31 billion yuan (US$22.4 billion) for the six months to June, up 873.64 per cent year on year, according to a filing...

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On-demand delivery giant Meituan swung back to profitability in the second quarter as China’s price war in food delivery cooled, allowing the company to scale back subsidies and target higher-value customers. Beijing-based Meituan posted an adjusted net profit of 2.5 billion yuan (US$372 million) for the June quarter, snapping a three-quarter losing streak according to its earnings report on Friday. The figure beat average analyst forecasts of 340 million yuan compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue rose...

MiniMax expands Alibaba cloud pact as compute needs surge for training and inference

MiniMax expands Alibaba cloud pact as compute needs surge for training and inference

Chinese artificial intelligence firm MiniMax has raised the three-year purchase ceiling on its cloud computing deals with Alibaba Group Holding by 220 per cent to US$1.2 billion, underscoring surging demand for computing power among the country’s top AI developers. The Shanghai-based company planned to spend up to US$300 million on Alibaba Cloud services this year, nearly triple its original US$115 million cap, after burning through two-thirds of its budget by the end of June, according to its...

China thinks big on brain-computer interfaces after world-first surgery

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Alibaba pushes into South America’s AI market with launch of Brazil data centres

Alibaba pushes into South America’s AI market with launch of Brazil data centres

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Zhipu AI shares jump as viral Ox Alpha model revealed as GLM-5.3-Flash on Chinese chips

Zhipu AI shares jump as viral Ox Alpha model revealed as GLM-5.3-Flash on Chinese chips

China’s Zhipu AI has launched its latest open-weight model, GLM-5.3-Flash – previously code-named Ox Alpha – saying that the system ran entirely on a cluster of 100,000 domestically produced chips during a high-profile stealth trial. The announcement followed a week of heavy traffic on artificial intelligence model marketplace OpenRouter and agent platform OpenCode, where the model processed 62 trillion tokens before its formal release on Wednesday, according to Zhipu. On OpenRouter, the system...

Nvidia ships first H200 chips to China, but forecasts no data-centre computing revenue

Nvidia ships first H200 chips to China, but forecasts no data-centre computing revenue

Nvidia has confirmed its first shipments of H200 data-centre processors to China under a new US licensing scheme, ending a months-long lockout. However, the sales accounted for less than 1 per cent of the company’s US$89 billion data-centre revenue in its second quarter, which ended on July 26. The H200 disclosure marked a shift from the previous quarter, when Nvidia said it had made no shipments of Data Centre Hopper products to China. Although Washington approved H200 exports in January,...

MiniMax revenue surges 283% but remains behind pace to meet forecast amid crowded AI race

MiniMax revenue surges 283% but remains behind pace to meet forecast amid crowded AI race

Chinese artificial intelligence firm MiniMax on Wednesday posted a 283 per cent surge in first-half revenue to US$116.6 million, powered by a 700 per cent jump in its enterprise business, though top-line growth remains off pace to hit full-year analyst forecasts. Revenue for the six months ended June 30 accounted for roughly 32 per cent of the US$363.77 million expected by analysts for the full year 2026, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The company reported full-year revenue of...

AI boom, profit surge fuel China’s ambitious chip assembly buildout

AI boom, profit surge fuel China’s ambitious chip assembly buildout

China’s leading semiconductor packaging and testing companies have launched a multibillion-dollar capacity expansion drive, as they ride a surge in artificial intelligence demand, stellar first-half profit growth, and Beijing’s urgent push for tech self-sufficiency. In the first half of the year, China’s three leading outsourced chip packaging companies – Jiangsu Changjiang Electronics Technology (JCET), Tongfu Microelectronics and Huatian Technology – announced capacity expansion investments...

DeepSeek nears pre-IPO funding round as 2027 market debut takes shape: sources

DeepSeek nears pre-IPO funding round as 2027 market debut takes shape: sources

DeepSeek is nearing the completion of a new funding round valuing the company at about 500 billion yuan (US$74 billion) before investment, as the Chinese artificial intelligence start-up moves closer to a potential listing on Shanghai’s Star Market, according to people familiar with the matter. The company was seeking to raise about 50 billion yuan in the round, which was expected to close before the end of August, according to one person. Investors included incumbents from the company’s last...

Huawei, HP settle disputes with multi-year Wi-fi patent cross-licensing deal

Huawei, HP settle disputes with multi-year Wi-fi patent cross-licensing deal

China’s Huawei Technologies and US personal computer giant HP announced on Wednesday that they had reached a deal to license each other’s Wi-fi patents. The two companies signed a multi-year global patent cross-licensing agreement, which granted HP the right to use certain Huawei Wi-fi patents on its PCs for a fee. “This agreement is a strong testament to Huawei’s persistent independent innovation in cutting-edge fields in information and communications technology,” said Alan Fan, Huawei’s chief...

Divergent results for Apple suppliers highlight memory price squeeze ahead of new iPhone

Divergent results for Apple suppliers highlight memory price squeeze ahead of new iPhone

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Moon mission delay a hiccup, but Chinese rocket city Wenchang remains on the march

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For generations, Wenchang, on Hainan’s northeastern coast, was better known for coconuts, its namesake chicken and the emigrants who left for Southeast Asia in search of a living. Now the rhythms of life here have been altered, gradually and then all at once, by China’s space programme. Wenchang Space Launch Site staged its first launch in 2016. Since then it has become one of the country’s top name-cards for rocket launches. I was near the site over the weekend, excited to witness the planned...

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