For the past two years, China's AI companies have competed on a single axis: whose model performs best. That contest is starting to give way to a harder one — whether those models can actually run, at scale, on chips made in China, as US restrictions on advanced AI chip exports raise the stakes of that question.
The 2026 Global Automotive and Technology Expo (GATE 2026) closed on August 28 at the Malaysia International Trade and Exhibition Centre (MITEC) in Kuala Lumpur. It highlighted Malaysia's contradictory but pragmatic stance toward China in the auto sector. Over the three-day event, the main story for ASEAN's auto industry was not a new car or new technology. It was Malaysia's balancing act around the "China factor."
A Chinese autonomous driving vendor is set to take a commercial position in a market whose own robotaxi industry has yet to clear the hurdle to commercialization. Pony.ai and South Korea's FutureLink signed a strategic cooperation agreement on August 28 at the Conrad Seoul in Yeouido to introduce 200 seventh-generation robotaxis, targeting fully driverless operation in Seoul by 2028, The Asia Business Daily reported. Pony.ai co-founder and chief executive James Peng attended the signing alongside FutureLink chairman Nam Kyung-pil and chief executive Cha Doo-won, according to SBS.
Seven Chinese silicon wafer producers reported first-half 2026 results in the second half of August, indicating an uneven sector recovery. Several semiconductor-grade wafer makers swung from losses to reported profits, though how much of that improvement came from core operations rather than one-off items varies widely by company. The two solar-wafer producers in the group, meanwhile, remain far deeper in the red amid a separate, unrelated downturn.
As embodied intelligence takes physical form amid widespread production-capacity expansion in the humanoid robot sector, it is becoming increasingly possible to envision a society in which the boundaries between human intelligence and machine activity grow progressively blurred under AI's expanding reach.
China's second humanoid robot games, held in Beijing from August 22 to August 26, 2026, sent videos and clips racing across social media and underscored how fast humanoid robotics is advancing. For Taiwan, the spectacle also highlighted both the promise and the risks of robots in policing, firefighting, and even warfare.
China's humanoid robot industry is flourishing, and the recently concluded World Robot Conference (WRC) 2026 in Beijing revealed a notable shift in focus. Unlike previous years, when walking and motion capabilities dominated the competition, attention is increasingly moving toward robots' end-effectors.
The AI infrastructure race has spent the past few years fixated on high-bandwidth memory as one of the most indispensable building blocks of accelerated compute. Yet as model sizes, context windows and inference workloads continue to expand, the bottleneck is increasingly shifting from how much memory can be stacked toward how efficiently data can move between memory and compute.
Huawei rotating chairman Eric Xu said at the HarmonyOS Ecosystem Conference 2026 in Shenzhen on August 28 that the HarmonyOS ecosystem now has more than 100,000 native applications, while HarmonyOS smartphones can access more than 400,000 apps. As of August 20, the number of devices running HarmonyOS 6 had exceeded 80 million and is expected to surpass 100 million in the fourth quarter of 2026.
China's memory-chip industry is narrowing parts of the technology gap with global leaders on two fronts. YMTC is approaching SK Hynix in NAND revenue share while running a more advanced layer mix, and CXMT is moving deeper into DRAM process technology with mass-produced high-k materials and a broader HBM roadmap.
At the Sustainability Environment Asia Conference 2026, Gunalan Kaniasan, principal for water resources in Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJC) at AWS, outlined strategies for water sustainability across the Asia-Pacific region. As data center demand grows, AWS is actively collaborating with governments and utilities to introduce recycled-water alternatives, navigate regulatory barriers, and test water-credit mechanisms.
At GATE 2026, Kaizhong, a major Chinese commutator maker, used its display to showcase how its automotive business has laid the groundwork for expansion into data centers, dexterous hands, and drones. The company is also targeting new opportunities in Southeast Asia as Chinese automakers deepen their regional footprint.
Huawei's Ascend 910C is already sold out in China, but domestic chips still cannot fully replace Nvidia's H200s. The shortage matters beyond China because AI compute constraints, pricing, and supply chain shifts are reshaping how quickly companies worldwide can deploy advanced inference systems.
Samsung Electronics expects products based on its first-generation zHBM specifications to appear in 2029 or later, giving the 3D memory concept unveiled earlier this month an initial product window. Heat remains a key engineering hurdle as Samsung works to stack HBM directly above AI accelerators.
Renesas Electronics has opened a physical AI and robotics lab in Beijing, a move that could speed the development of safer, smarter machines for factories, logistics, and homes worldwide. The facility is designed to help customers test, validate, and co-develop robotic systems as physical AI shifts from concept to real-world deployment.
More than a year after Honor first debated the idea internally, its Robot Phone has moved from a contentious concept to a mass-produced commercial product. But the significance of the device extends beyond creating a smartphone with an unconventional form factor.
