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Gavekal Technologies: Chips
On The Ground At The 2026 World AI Conference (Part II)
Laila Khawaja, Huang Shichan
30 Jul 2026
The 2026 WAIC showcased thousands of competitive AI products targeting consumer, enterprise, and government adoption. Competition is expanding beyond foundational models toward enterprise solutions and next-generation consumer-AI interfaces, including agentic smartphones and humanoid robots. Despite strong investment, policy support, and expanding pilots, commercialization remains constrained by uncertain revenue models, high computing costs, integration barriers, and uncertain legal frameworks.
Gavekal Technologies: Briefing
What Just Happened, Kimi?
Laila Khawaja, Arthur Kroeber, Tom Hancock
27 Jul 2026
The US tech world spent much of the past 10 days freaking out over the latest high-performance Chinese AI model release, Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3. This once again conjured the specter of cheap open-weight Chinese models blowing up the revenue engines for their more costly American competitors. Shortly afterwards, Chinese open models went from villain to hero, as the US-based developer community Hugging Face used a Chinese model to fend off a rogue cyber attack by an OpenAI model.
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On The Ground At The 2026 World AI Conference (Part I)
The WAIC 2026 showcased China’s commercial and geopolitical AI ambitions, with President Xi Jinping’s first attendance, demonstrations of Chinese AI supernodes, and the launch of a new international cooperation body signaling Beijing’s push to build an alternative to the US-led AI ecosystem. At the same time, the conference shows the constraints on these ambitions, including fierce competition, limited monetization, and a persistent shortage of advanced compute.
EVs’ Year Of Living Dangerously
China’s passenger car market is having a terrible 2026, and electric vehicles for once are no exception. Prices and margins are under pressure. Yet despite all that, the market is not consolidating—quite the opposite. What makes it all possible is exports, which now account for a third of Chinese EV makers’ unit sales. The question is how long international markets will be willing to absorb the rising tide of Chinese imports.
China Regulates AI Companion Agents
On July 15, ByteDance and Alibaba removed their user-defined AI agent features from their chatbots Doubao and Qwen. The move is widely seen as a proactive compliance response to eliminate regulatory risk as user-created AI agents, which are large in number and fragmented in styles and functions, are difficult to review and continuously monitor.
Five Questions On China Biotech
Investors have cooled on China’s biotechnology sector, after a spectacular run-up in Hong Kong biotech stocks in early 2025. This is a needed correction: China’s biotech companies are technologically strong, but commercially immature. Also in today’s China Tech Brief: drones and EVs.
Memory Shortage Hits Smartphones
Memory shortage hits non-AI sectors; DeepSeek and Zhipu seek to self develop chips; UBTech’s companion humanoids receive mixed feedback.
The New Energy System Takes Shape
China’s latest five-year plan for energy disappointed many analysts because of its unambitious targets for scaling back fossil fuel use. This misses the point. The plan is important because for the first time, Beijing is formally committing to an energy system based mainly on non-fossil fuels, with traditional coal, oil and gas as backup stabilizers. Achieving this goal will take another couple of decades, but policymakers are already starting to look beyond brute additions of renewables capacity to the efficiency measures that will be required for success.