Gavekal Technologies

Tesla’s market capitalization is by far the biggest among global automakers, mainly because it has sold itself as a leader in AI—not just in cars, but for humanoid robots as well. To turn its AI vision into reality, it needs China. Its Shanghai gigafactory enabled Tesla to scale up electric vehicle production; to scale up robotaxis and humanoids, it will have to figure out how to operate in both the US and China even as the two countries wall off their AI ecosystems from each other.

Beijing is all-in on AI agents: its AI-Plus strategy calls for agents to be nearly ubiquitous in the economy by 2030. But widespread adoption still faces many hurdles: agent reliability is still spotty, training data is hard to access and to standardize, and general agent-builders such as Alibaba are short on the domain expertise needed to build industry-specific agents.