Chinese regulators have stepped up pressure on domestic companies to limit their reliance on U.S. artificial-intelligence chips, issuing guidance that discourages the use of Nvidia Corp.’s H20 processor and, in some cases, ordering a suspension of new purchases. Bloomberg reported that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently circulated notices advising firms to avoid the H20, especially in government or national-security projects, while The Information said the Cyberspace Administration of China instructed tech giants to freeze orders until it completes a security review. Companies including Alibaba Group, ByteDance and Tencent Holdings were told to justify any need for the H20 over Chinese alternatives, according to people familiar with the directives. The notices stop short of a formal ban but add administrative hurdles that could slow deliveries and prompt buyers to switch to domestic chips made by Huawei or Cambricon. Beijing’s guidance also extends to Advanced Micro Devices’ MI308 accelerator, the reports said. The clampdown comes only weeks after Washington lifted export curbs on the H20 in exchange for Nvidia handing 15% of related revenue to the U.S. government, a deal intended to restore sales worth billions of dollars. Analysts at Bernstein now expect Nvidia’s share of China’s AI-chip market to fall to 55% this year, from 66% in 2024, as customers reassess orders amid regulatory scrutiny. Nvidia said the H20 “is not a military product or for government infrastructure” and denied allegations of backdoors that could allow remote tracking or shutdown. Nevertheless, local semiconductor suppliers gained on the news: Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. rose about 5% in Hong Kong trading, while Cambricon Technologies hit the 20% daily limit in Shanghai. The latest measures highlight the widening technology rift between Washington and Beijing despite the revenue-sharing arrangement and reinforce China’s campaign to accelerate adoption of home-grown chips in sensitive sectors.

Alibaba has unveiled its first AI-powered smart glasses, named Quark, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2025 in Shanghai. The Quark glasses are expected to launch in China by late 2025 and represent Alibaba's entry into the competitive smart glasses market, positioning themselves as a potential rival to Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. The device is powered by Alibaba's Qwen large language model and the Quark AI assistant, integrating features such as hands-free calls, music playback, real-time translation, and shopping capabilities. The glasses also incorporate seamless integration with Alibaba's ecosystem, including Alipay for payments, Taobao for shopping, and Gaode (Amap) for mapping and navigation. Technologically, the Quark glasses utilize Qualcomm's AR1 and a low-power dual system chip, making them approximately 40% slimmer than existing smart glasses on the market. This launch marks a notable expansion of Alibaba into AI-driven hardware products.

Alibaba Group accelerated its overseas infrastructure build-out this week, announcing that Alibaba Cloud has activated its third data center in Malaysia and will open a second facility in the Philippines in October 2025. The company said the additional capacity will improve resilience and support rising demand for AI-related workloads across Southeast Asia. Complementing the new server farms, Alibaba disclosed plans for an AI Global Competency Center in Singapore, where it intends to collaborate with more than 5,000 partners on cloud and artificial-intelligence projects. The initiatives form part of the Hangzhou-based firm’s broader push to capture enterprise customers beyond its home market. At the same time, Alibaba’s e-commerce arm Taobao is rolling out a 50 billion-yuan (about US$7 billion) package of vouchers and discounts over the next year to bolster food-delivery and online-retail sales in China. The subsidy program comes as competition from PDD Holdings, Meituan and JD.com intensifies, and aligns with Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu’s pledge to lean on AI and aggressive incentives to revive growth.

Tencent Holdings Ltd. released four open-source variants of its HunYuan large language model on 4 Aug., offering parameter sizes of 0.5 billion, 1.8 billion, 4 billion and 7 billion. The lightweight models handle up to 256,000 tokens and feature separate fast and slow reasoning modes, allowing them to run on a single consumer GPU and target use cases ranging from smart-home speakers to in-car assistants and personal computers. Hours later, Alibaba Group’s Qwen team introduced Qwen-Image, a 20-billion-parameter text-to-image model based on the MMDiT architecture. Alibaba says the system achieves state-of-the-art in-pixel text rendering in both English and Chinese, broadening its open-weight portfolio beyond language to multimodal generation. The rapid succession of releases underscores intensifying competition among Chinese technology giants to court developers with freely available model weights, a strategy that contrasts with U.S. rival OpenAI’s decision to delay open-sourcing its latest systems over security concerns.

Alibaba has released Wan 2.2, an open-source text- and image-to-video model that packs 27 billion parameters—14 billion of them active—and is distributed under the permissive Apache 2.0 licence. Early testers say the system delivers video quality on par with closed-source rivals such as Veo 2 and Kling 2.0, marking one of the first high-performance video generators whose weights are freely available for developers to fine-tune. AI-hosting platform Replicate became the first commercial provider to deploy Wan 2.2, charging US$0.05 per 480p clip and US$0.10 for 720p output. Stock-image marketplace Freepik simultaneously integrated the model into its AI Suite, highlighting its frame-level control over lighting, colour and camera movement. Replicate also rolled out a speed-optimised version of MiniMax’s Hailuo 02 that can render six- or ten-second videos at 512p for about US$0.10 each—pricing that undercuts many proprietary services. Independent benchmarks suggest generation times have fallen to roughly 55 seconds, with further reductions expected. The twin launches signal accelerating competition in generative video, as open-source licences and rapidly falling inference costs broaden access for filmmakers, advertisers and software developers while increasing pressure on closed platforms to match price and performance.

Alibaba Group announced a strategic reorganization by merging its food delivery platform Ele.me and online travel agency Fliggy into its core China e-commerce business group. The integration aims to create a more unified consumer platform combining takeout, travel, and shopping services. Despite the merger, Ele.me and Fliggy will maintain independent corporate management with their respective chiefs, Fan Yu at Ele.me and Nantian at Fliggy, continuing in their roles but now reporting to Jiang Fan, who oversees the entire domestic marketplace including these units. This move is part of Alibaba's broader shift toward becoming a comprehensive consumer platform amid intensifying competition from rivals such as Meituan and Pinduoduo. The reorganization was communicated internally by Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu and reflects the company's strategic focus on 'instant retail' to enhance consumer experiences.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has praised Chinese artificial intelligence models and the country's open-source AI initiatives during multiple appearances at the China International Supply Chain Expo and other events in Beijing. Huang described AI models developed by Chinese firms such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent, MiniMax, Baidu's Ernie bot, and Moonshot's Kimi as world-class and among the best open reasoning models globally. He highlighted China's open-source AI as a catalyst for global progress, emphasizing its role in transforming industries, revolutionizing supply chains, and enabling broader participation in the AI revolution worldwide. Huang also noted that hundreds of Chinese projects leverage Nvidia's Omniverse platform for digital twin simulations to optimize factories and improve human-robot collaboration. Furthermore, he expressed optimism about China's advancements in AI, robotics, and smart manufacturing, citing the country's unique advantages in AI technology, mechatronics, electromechanical systems, and its extensive manufacturing ecosystem. Huang underscored the importance of open-source AI for security and international cooperation and sought win-win cooperation with China despite ongoing trade tensions. He also praised Huawei as an incredible technology company and described China's supply chain as a "miracle," reflecting deep capabilities in AI and computer science.

Moonshot AI, an Alibaba-backed artificial-intelligence startup, has open-sourced its new large language model, Kimi K2. The company and early users say the system approaches GPT-4-level instruction following while remaining free to download and deploy. Kimi K2 employs a mixture-of-experts architecture with roughly one trillion parameters and can handle up to 128,000 tokens of context, allowing it to process long documents and code bases. The Unsloth developer group has already released a 1.8-bit version that shrinks the original 1.1-terabyte weights to 245 gigabytes—an 80 % reduction—so the model can run on high-end local hardware. Cloud providers and tool makers moved quickly to integrate the model. Groq reports inference speeds of about 185 tokens per second, while Anycoder, NetMind and OpenRouter have added Kimi K2 endpoints for rapid application development and agent frameworks. The rapid uptake underscores the demand for high-performance, open-source alternatives to proprietary AI systems.

Alibaba on Thursday introduced Qwen VLo, a multimodal model that generates images from text or existing pictures and displays each step of the creative process through so-called progressive generation. The release expands the Hangzhou-based company’s Qwen family of large language models and underscores Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu’s declaration that developing artificial general intelligence is Alibaba’s “primary objective.” Analysts position Qwen VLo as a direct challenger to OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Imagen 4. Commentators who have tested early versions say the model matches GPT-4o-level creativity while working across multiple languages. Its debut follows Tencent’s launch of Hunyuan-A13B, a compact model that blends rapid inference with advanced reasoning on a single graphics processor, highlighting Chinese vendors’ rapid progress in generative AI. The competitive pressure extends beyond model releases. In the United States, Meta Platforms has spent US$14.2 billion for a 49 percent stake in data-labeling firm Scale AI and recruited four senior researchers from OpenAI, luring them with signing bonuses that Chief Executive Sam Altman says exceed US$100 million each. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is assembling a new team to pursue so-called superintelligence after his Llama 4 model underperformed peers earlier this year. Industrywide, capital outlays are soaring. Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google together expect to spend about US$320 billion on infrastructure this year, more than double 2023 levels, as they race to secure data-centre capacity and top talent. The flurry of product launches and billion-dollar hiring packages signals that large technology groups view overspending as less risky than being overtaken in the next phase of AI development.

The European Union has intensified its investigation into Alibaba Group's e-commerce platform AliExpress, accusing it of breaching the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) by failing to adequately prevent the sale of illegal, dangerous, and counterfeit products. Brussels has identified systemic failures in AliExpress's content moderation and enforcement mechanisms, concluding that the platform's current measures are insufficient to mitigate these risks. Despite some commitments made by AliExpress to address these issues, the European Commission maintains that the company underestimates the risks posed by its platform and has not effectively penalized merchants selling illegal goods. The EU is considering imposing a substantial fine on AliExpress for non-compliance with digital regulations. Following increased regulatory pressure, AliExpress has stepped up efforts to remove suspicious products, but these concessions have yet to satisfy EU authorities. This development marks a significant escalation in the EU's scrutiny of Chinese online marketplaces under its digital regulatory framework.

Alibaba Group announced a strategic reorganization by merging its food delivery platform Ele.me and online travel agency Fliggy into its core China e-commerce business group. The move, communicated internally by CEO Eddie Wu, aims to create a unified consumer platform integrating takeout, travel, and shopping services while maintaining independent corporate management for the merged units. Jiang Fan, head of the China e-commerce business group, now oversees Ele.me and Fliggy, with their respective chiefs continuing to report to him. This restructuring reflects Alibaba's response to intensifying competition from rivals such as Meituan and JD.com in the on-demand delivery and online travel sectors. In parallel, Alibaba has streamlined its leadership by reducing the number of partners from 26 to 17 during fiscal year 2025, with former CEO Daniel Zhang and eight others stepping down. Jiang Fan's promotion to the top leadership circle underscores the company's focus on e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and overseas expansion amid these changes.

Alibaba Cloud is set to open its second data center in South Korea by the end of June 2025, three years after launching its first facility in the country. This expansion is part of Alibaba's broader $52.9 billion investment in artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure announced earlier this year. The new data center aims to address the growing demand for AI infrastructure, particularly amid the rising adoption of generative AI services. Alibaba's move reflects its strategy to strengthen its global presence in cloud computing and AI, alongside other Chinese tech firms like ByteDance, which are also expanding their data center footprints internationally.