Companies in Hangzhou, China, are striving for global AI dominance as the technology race between China and the U.S. heats up. A cluster of elite startups, or the "six dragons", are working around the clock to beat California's Silicon Valley at its own game.

Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has hinted that China will soon have homegrown "next generation" chips to support its AI development.

Now Liangzhu, with its myriad AI startups, represents the future. Investors from all over China flock there to meet growing numbers of founders, app engineers and other AI developers and dreamers. It is six months since a barely known AI startup,

As some in the US agonize over the country's pace in the "AI race," it seems China is already standing at the podium.

Behind closed doors, Chinese researchers are laying the groundwork for a new global AI agenda—without input from the US.

About 500 robot athletes from 16 countries competed in Beijing as the United States and China race each other to shape the future of AI.

Despite the restrictions, Chinese firms kept training world-beating AI models—Kimi K 2, unveiled in July by Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based lab founded by an alumnus of Google and Meta, rose straight to the top of the global leaderboards.

As Washington tries to limit its progress, Beijing is spending more to build an artificial-intelligence ecosystem that doesn’t rely on U.S. technology.

China has rolled out a chatbot on its Tiangong space station. Its mission: to improve safety, navigation, and coordination in orbit.

Despite U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors, the company had managed to develop a customizable open technology that could compete with some of the most advanced proprietary American AI models,

DeepSeek announced the v3.1 model through a message on WeChat, China's widely used social platform, and on the Hugging Face community website. The new model boasts