Alibaba Group Holding’s revamped artificial intelligence (AI) assistant app, Quark, which offers a user-friendly interface, has surpassed ByteDance’s Doubao to become China’s most popular AI app in March, showing its appeal among local users. Quark ranked at the top among Chinese AI apps with nearly 150 million monthly active users (MAUs) worldwide, followed by ByteDance’s…
BlackRock, the asset manager at the centre of a deal to buy US$23 billion in port assets from Li Ka-shing’s CK Hutchison Holdings, has about US$15.5 billion invested in Hong Kong and mainland-listed stocks through its China-focused funds, with its portfolios concentrated on technology and financial companies. According to its website, the world’s largest money…
Microsoft has closed its IoT & AI Insider Lab in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang hi-tech zone, marking the latest sign of the US tech giant’s retreat from China amid rising geopolitical tensions. The Shanghai lab, meant to help with domestic development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, closed earlier this year, according…
DeepSeek has not only boosted China’s confidence in its quest for leadership in the global artificial intelligence (AI) industry, but also rapidly transformed the domestic AI model landscape into a solar system, where the start-up becomes the sun around which a number of major planets revolve. A year ago, China’s large language model (LLM) sector…
Standard Chartered will open one wealth management centre a year over the next five years in Hong Kong as part of its global strategy to grow its wealth business and also tap small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Greater Bay Area, according to a senior executive. “We are focused on opening more wealth management…
Shanghai-based semiconductor start-up StarFive aims to boost adoption of its chips with the financial backing of the Hong Kong government, according to its founder, as China bets on the open-source RISC-V architecture to strengthen its chip industry amid escalating tensions with the US. The six-year-old RISC-V chipmaker secured an undisclosed sum from the Hong Kong…
A total of 41 new corporate venture capital funds were registered in the coastal province last year, the highest number among those recorded in 18 mainland provinces in the same period, according to the latest data from CYZone Research Centre in China. Zhejiang has been attracting more investments amid the province’s evolution from e-commerce hub…
Hong Kong stocks rose on Wednesday, led by a record surge in one of the city’s largest companies after CK Hutchison Holdings disposed of assets near the Panama Canal amid US-China tensions and an unfolding trade war. The Hang Seng Index advanced 1.1 per cent to 23,203.85 as of 11.12am local time. The Hang Seng…
A new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs, represented by a group of start-up founders known as the “Fantastic Four”, are reshaping the global technology landscape and helping China in its rivalry with the US. Liang Wenfeng, founder of Hangzhou-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek, along with Wang Xingxing, Zhang Yiming and Wang Tao, the founders of…
Hong Kong is betting on the RISC-V open-source chip architecture to drive innovation and secure a position in China’s semiconductor landscape amid escalating US chip restrictions. RISC-V stands for the fifth generation of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer, a design philosophy for simplified architectures for central processing units (CPUs). As an open-source project, it is…