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Gavekal Technologies: New Energy
China Wind Power’s Global Challenge
AJ Cortese
17 Aug 2026
Chinese wind turbine makers are champions at home but much less visible abroad than their peers in solar, EVs and batteries. A big factor is that the project economics of wind power are unique. Nonetheless, Chinese wind firms are increasingly looking abroad, and are set to do well in price-sensitive emerging markets.
Gavekal Technologies: Chips
The Next Stage Of The LLM Race
Laila Khawaja
13 Aug 2026
The popular framing of cheap Chinese open-weight models challenging expensive US closed models is becoming less useful as both sides adopt tiered strategies. LLM pricing is increasingly defined by model tier and business strategy rather than a model’s origin. The key questions are whether US labs can advance the frontier fast enough to preserve premium pricing, and whether Chinese labs can convert adoption into durable revenue to sustain frontier development.
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The Tech Truce Starts To Fray
In May, presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping promised a new era of “constructive strategic stability.” What we have seen since then is a simmering tension, as the US has tried to restrict Chinese tech imports through a series of measures by a new actor, the Federal Communications Commission. China finally responded in early August with a calibrated set of its own restrictions, designed to respond to the US but not to escalate.
China’s Export Engine Meets Europe’s Carbon Rules
Europe’s desire to limit imports of carbon-intensive goods is leading to changes in industrial China. Beijing has launched a set of zero-carbon industrial parks that will tightly link factories with renewable energy sources, helping them cut their carbon footprint and comply with new EU regulations that will tax carbon-intensive steel and aluminum imports and bar entry to batteries that fail to meet carbon limits.
On The Ground At The 2026 World AI Conference (Part II)
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.
What Just Happened, Kimi?
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.
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.