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Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Silicon Valley of the East

A quiet suburb is the coder ‘village’ at the heart of China’s ai frenzy.

Evening strollers on a wide walking path by West Lake in Hangzhou, China, June 27, 2025. As China vies with Silicon Valley for primacy, Hangzhou, home to DeepSeek and Alibaba, is where the country’s aspiring tech titans mingle and share ideas. — Photos: QILAI SHEN/The New York Times

IT was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and dozens of people sat in the grass around a backyard stage where aspiring founders of tech startups talked about their ideas. People in the crowd slouched over laptops, vaping and drinking strawberry Frappuccinos. A drone buzzed overhead. Inside the house, investors took pitches in the kitchen.


It looked like Silicon Valley, but it was Liangzhu, a quiet suburb of the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou, which is a hot spot for entrepreneurs and tech talent lured by low rents and proximity to tech companies like Alibaba and Deepseek.


“People come here to explore their own possibilities,” said Felix Tao, 36, a former Facebook and Alibaba employee who hosted the event.


Virtually all of those possibilities involve artificial intelligence. As China faces off with the United States over tech primacy, Hangzhou has become the centre of China’s AI frenzy.


A decade ago, the provincial and local governments started offering subsidies and tax breaks to new companies in Hangzhou, a policy that has helped incubate hundreds of startups. On weekends, people fly in from Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen to hire programmers.


Lately, many of them have ended up in Tao’s backyard. He helped found an AI research lab at Alibaba before leaving to start his own company, Mindverse, in 2022. Now Tao’s home is a hub for coders who have settled in Liangzhu, many in their 20s and 30s. They call themselves “villagers”, writing code in coffee shops during the day and gaming together at night, hoping to harness AI to create their own companies.


Hangzhou has already birthed tech powerhouses, not only Alibaba and Deepseek but also Netease and Hikvision.


In January, Deepseek shook the tech world when it released an AI system that it said it had made for a small fraction of the cost that Silicon Valley companies had spent on their own. Since then, systems made by Deepseek and Alibaba have ranked among the top-performing open source AI models in the world, meaning they are available for anyone to build on.


Graduates from Hangzhou’s Zhejiang University, where Deepseek’s founder studied, have become sought-after employees at Chinese tech companies.


Chinese media closely followed the poaching of a core member of Deepseek’s team by the electronics company Xiaomi. In Liangzhu, many engineers said


People come here to explore their own possibilities. Felix Tao


they were killing time until they could create their own startups, waiting out noncompete agreements they had signed at bigger companies like Bytedance.


Deepseek is one of six AI and robotics startups from the city that Chinese media calls the “six tigers of Hangzhou”.


Last year, one of the six, Game Science, released China’s first big-budget video game to become a global hit, Black Myth: Wukong. Another firm, Unitree, grabbed public attention in January when its robots danced onstage during the Chinese state broadcaster’s televised annual spring gala.


This spring, Mingming Zhu, the founder of Rokid, a Hangzhou startup that makes Ai-enabled eyeglasses, invited the six founders to his home for dinner.


It was the first time they had all met in person, Zhu said. Like him, most of the six had studied at Zhejiang University or worked at Alibaba.


“When we started, we were small fish,” Zhu said. “But even then, the government helped out.” He said government officials had helped him connect with Rokid’s earliest investors, including Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.


Too much of a good thing?


But some said the government support for Hangzhou’s tech scene had scared off some investors. Several company founders, who asked not to be named so they could discuss sensitive topics, said it was difficult for them to attract funds from foreign venture capital firms, frustrating their ambitions to grow outside China.


The nightmare situation, they said, would be to end up like Bytedance, the Chinese parent of Tiktok, whose executives have been questioned before US Congress about the company’s ties to the Chinese government.


Founders described choosing between two paths for their companies’ growth: Take government funding and tailor their product to the Chinese market, or raise enough money on their own to set up offices in a country like Singapore to pitch foreign investors. For most, the first was the only feasible option.


Another uncertainty is access to the advanced computer chips that power artificial intelligence systems. Washington has spent years trying to prevent Chinese companies from buying these chips, and Chinese companies like Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp are racing to produce their nd own.


So far, the Chinese-made chips work well enough to help companies like Bytedance provide some of their AI services in China. Many Chinese companies have created stockpiles of Nvidia chips despite Washington’s controls. But it is not clear how long that supply will last, or how quickly China’s chipmakers can catch up to their American counterparts.


Mindverse, the company cofounded by Tao, who hosted the backyard event, is working on a product that would use AI to help people manage their lives. It can send supportive daily emails to colleagues, for example, or regular text messages to parents reminiscing about family vacations.


“I don’t want the AI to just handle tasks, but to actually give you more mental space so you can unplug,” Tao said.


Many in the crowd in Tao’s backyard said the atmosphere in Hangzhou, set on the banks of a lake that was muse to generations of Chinese poets and painters, fuelled their creativity.


Lin Yuanlin started his company, Zeabur, while studying at Zhejiang University. His company provides back-end systems to people who are making apps and websites by “vibecoding”, or using AI tools to program without deep software knowledge.


Liangzhu is the perfect testing ground for his product, Lin said. He can lean over to someone in a coffee shop or wander into a neighbour’s living room and learn what kind of support they need for their startups. Lin found himself going to Liangzhu so often that he moved there. – ©2025 The New York Times Company


Alibaba Innovation Park, a complex the tech giant leases to other tech firms, in Hangzhou, China.



A promenade at Dream Town, a facility for startups and one of the numerous investments in tech made by the country’s government, in Hangzhou, China.


Commuters on one of several subway lines that service Alibaba’s headquarters and other surrounding tech companies, in Hangzhou, China.


Visitors by West Lake in Hangzhou, China. Many in the crowd in Tao’s backyard said the atmosphere in Hangzhou, set on the banks of a lake that was muse to generations of Chinese poets and painters, fueled their creativity.

Silicon Valley of the East

As China faces off with the United States over tech primacy, Hangzhou has become the centre of China's AI frenzy. A decade ago, the provincial ...

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Official predicts 100 AI breakthroughs

 
Wave of innovation set to change economy

New wave: Signage outside DeepSeek’s office in Beijing. The company’s AI is considered much cheaper to set up than Western competitors. — Reuters

Beijing: China’s advantages in developing artificial intelligence (AI) are about to unleash a wave of innovation that will generate more than 100 DeepSeek-like breakthroughs in the coming 18 months, according to a former top official.

The new software products “will fundamentally change the nature and the tech nature of the whole Chinese economy,” Zhu Min, who was previously a deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, said during the World Economic Forum in Tianjin yesterday.

Zhu, who also served as the deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund, sees a transformation made possible by harnessing China’s pool of engineers, massive consumer base and supportive government policies. 

The bullish take on China’s AI future promises no letup in the competition for dominance in cutting-edge technologies with the United States, just as the world’s two biggest economies are also locked in a trade war.

The United States sees China as a key rival in the field of AI, especially after DeepSeek shocked the global tech industry in January with its low-cost but powerful model. 

In addition to efforts to prevent China from securing advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment, Washington is blocking Chinese companies from acquiring Nvidia Corp’s high-end AI chips for training, citing national security concerns.

Beijing is now pinning its hopes on domestic tech giants like Huawei Technologies Co when it comes to advanced chipmaking. 

The emergence of DeepSeek triggered a rally in China’s tech stocks, fuelling optimism over Chinese competitiveness despite tensions over trade with the Trump administration and economic challenges at home.

Bloomberg Economics estimates the contribution of high-tech to China’s gross domestic product (GDP) climbed to about 15% last year – from near 14% a year earlier – and could exceed 18% in 2026.

Despite a tariff truce negotiated a month ago with the United States, American levies are still at high levels, with a more lasting deal still in question. 

Zhu said the United States will likely see inflation pick up starting in August, as it takes some time for tariffs to feed through to the economy and for companies to use up stockpiles they accumulated before Trump hiked duties. 

“The uncertainty brought by US tariff policy is an important factor that may lead to negative growth in global trade this year,” Zhu told reporters on the sidelines of the forum.

“The entire trade industrial chain has begun to slow, investments has begun to stop, so the impact is greater than the actual tariff rate.”

The World Economic Forum meeting in Tianjin, also known as “Summer Davos”, has attracted global business executives and world leaders. 

Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh are scheduled to speak at the three-day event.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang is expected to address the conference during the opening plenary today and meet with participants.

Despite a tariff truce negotiated a month ago with the United States, American levies are still at high levels, with a more lasting deal still in question.

Analysts polled by Bloomberg forecast GDP will slip to 4.5% this year, significantly below the official target of around 5%. It expanded 5.4% in the first quarter.

“The uncertainty brought by US tariff policy is an important factor that may lead to negative growth in global trade this year,” Zhu told reporters on the sidelines of the forum. “The entire trade industrial chain has begun to slow, investments has begun to stop, so the impact is greater than the actual tariff rate.”

Zhu said the United States will likely see inflation pick up starting in August, as it takes some time for tariffs to feed through to the economy and for companies to use up stockpiles they accumulated before Trump hiked duties.

Despite shocks from abroad, China’s GDP likely grew faster than 5% in the second quarter, according to Huang Yiping, a member of the Chinese central bank’s monetary policy committee. Speaking on another panel at the Tianjin forum, he pointed to the economy’s solid performance in April and May.

But despite strong retail sales in May, when they grew at the fastest pace since December 2023, Huang said China still needs to address the issue of insufficient consumption. — Bloomberg

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Report reveals China's innovation-driven development is gaining steam

A report from China's State Council on Tuesday revealed that the country has made notable strides in advancing innovation-driven development, and that its innovation-driven strategy has been gaining momentum.


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