China

XPENG began mass production of its L4 robotaxi on May 18, making it the first Chinese automaker to build a robotaxi entirely through in-house engineering.

A Nature study extracts 11 proteins from six Homo erectus teeth found in China, revealing a shared amino acid variant with Denisovans now present in some Southeast Asian and Oceanian populations.

Shenzhou 23 lifted off May 24 carrying Lai Ka-ying, Hong Kong's first astronaut, with one of the three crew members set for China's first year-long spaceflight.

The IEA's Global EV Outlook 2026 finds one in four new cars sold worldwide was electric in 2025, with China dominating production and exports even as US sales softened after the EV tax credit expired.

China Three Gorges Corporation anchored a 16 MW, 252-metre-rotor turbine in deep water off Yangjiang on May 2, setting a new benchmark for floating offshore wind and cutting cost per kilowatt by more than 50% versus its 2021 predecessor.

Inceptio and Pony.ai executives push back on hype: LLM advances don't translate to AV commercialization, which still depends on accumulated miles, regulation, and industry partnerships.

The Jinan industrial-robot maker's HK$750 million IPO drew 330,000 retail subscribers and HK$564.3 billion in orders, eclipsing the previous Hong Kong record of 11,464 times set by Golden Leaf International.

Washington has licensed Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com and distributors Lenovo and Foxconn to buy up to 75,000 H200s each. Not one chip has shipped — Beijing is pushing buyers toward Huawei.

China's tenth Tianzhou cargo spacecraft lifted off from Wenchang at 8:14 a.m. Beijing time on May 11 and rendezvoused with Tiangong's Tianhe core module the same afternoon, delivering propellant, a new EVA suit, and six scientific payloads.

The Beijing lab behind Kimi K2.6 raised $2 billion led by Meituan's Long-Z Investments, lifting its valuation to $20 billion and bringing six-month funding to $3.9 billion as ARR cleared $200 million.

Apple posted $111.2 billion in Q2 revenue and $29.6 billion in profit, beating estimates as iPhone 17 lifted sales 22 percent and Greater China rebounded 28 percent. The board added $100 billion to buybacks before Cook hands the CEO role to Ternus.

Tencent's Hunyuan team released HY-World 2.0 on April 16, an open-source multi-modal foundation model that converts text or images into editable 3D assets importable into Unity, Unreal, and Isaac Sim — a sharp break from video-only world models like Google's Genie 3.