China’s “Lipstick King” has traded make-up swatches for artificial intelligence. Top live-streamer Li Jiaqi on Monday evening teamed up with an executive from Alibaba Group Holding to pitch AI subscriptions, selling nearly 100,000 monthly packages in just 30 minutes, according to data provided by the e-commerce giant. The broadcast on Taobao and Tmall – Alibaba’s largest domestic online marketplace – marked the first time generative AI products have taken centre stage during the annual Singles’...

Empyrean Technology, China’s top provider of electronic design automation (EDA) tools, plans to acquire a majority stake in a domestic start-up, reinforcing Beijing’s drive for tech self-sufficiency and bolstering support for Huawei Technologies’ semiconductor ambitions. The Beijing-based firm said in a Shenzhen Stock Exchange filing on Sunday that it would acquire a 50.38 per cent stake in Easy-Logic Technology for 218.8 million yuan (US$33 million). Once completed, the start-up would be...

For the first time, the amount of inference data generated by artificial intelligence systems in China has surpassed the amount of data used to train those systems, according to a new government-backed report, illustrating how the country is increasingly adopting AI at scale. The report released on Saturday by the China Centre for Information Industry Development (CCID), which operates under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), cited recent official data showing that...

Driving along the wide boulevards of Astana during a recent trip to the Kazakh capital, signs of China’s growing commercial footprint were everywhere. Chinese cars were becoming a common sight on the streets here, as brands from BYD to Changan made aggressive inroads in a market once dominated by South Korea’s Hyundai and Kia, said the driver who picked me up from the airport in a gleaming Changan electric vehicle. But it was not the rise of Chinese tech that had brought me to this energy-rich...