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Jul 21
WAIC 2026 elevates the 'token factory' — why is China chasing cheap tokens over bigger models?

At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, held July 17-20 across "three districts and four venues" with more than 1,100 exhibitors, one phrase recurred across vendor booths and keynotes: the "token factory".

Chinese AI chip developer Enflame said at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2026 that it had jointly showcased an AI chip sample with Shanghai Xianfeng Technology using glass-based Chip-on-Panel-on-Substrate (CoPoS) panel-level advanced packaging.

A funding-and-listing push by Beijing-based Moonshot AI signals that China's frontier-model race is spilling over into the capital markets, with implications for global AI valuations, the open-weight debate, and Nvidia's China-exposed customers.

Chinese GPU developer Biren Technology unveiled a next-generation near-packaged optics (NPO) super node at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2026, targeting the growing computing demands of large language models and AI agents.

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Moonshot AI launched its next-generation Kimi K3 model on July 17, delivering performance comparable with leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic on several critical tasks at only a fraction of the cost.
China smartphone shipments fell about 3% in the first half of 2026, even as major vendors accelerated new product launches and pushed harder into mid- to high-end models to protect margins. Huawei reclaimed the No. 1 market share position in China, while Apple and other rivals prepared new devices for the second half, according to the source material.
A nationwide survey in South Korea found overwhelming support for stronger punishment and broader economic security measures to address overseas leakage of core technologies, including semiconductors. The poll, released by the Korea Employers Federation and reported by Yonhap and Aju Daily, comes as the country's advanced industries play an outsized role in the economy.
The Pentagon has stepped up its review of wartime shortages in key raw materials, issuing two Requests for Information on July 14 through the Defense Logistics Agency's Warstopper Program. The effort seeks input from metal suppliers on titanium and magnesium usage, annual demand, lead times and stockpiling methods as Washington examines whether US defense production could continue if foreign supply chains were disrupted.
Supermicro's preliminary fourth-quarter results suggest the server maker's bet on rack-scale AI infrastructure is beginning to pay off in profitability, not just volume — and that a new class of "neocloud" buyers led by Elon Musk's SpaceX is reshaping its order book. The company said on Tuesday that it took in more than US$60 billion in new orders during the quarter ended June, driving its backlog to a record, even as revenue came in soft.
The global memory shortage will worsen in 2027 and may not begin to ease until the second half of 2028, with prices likely to remain elevated for the next two to three years, according to Wallace Kou, president and CEO of Silicon Motion.

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI said it welcomes competition from the world's top model developers after Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested his in-training 2-trillion-parameter model could "possibly surpass Kimi." The company also disclosed that roughly 70% of its business-to-business revenue now comes from API services, underscoring the growing weight of enterprise customers in its commercialization strategy.

China is considering tighter export controls on artificial intelligence and semiconductor technologies amid intensifying competition with the US in frontier AI. The proposed measures, reported by Financial Times, would also target overseas acquisitions of advanced technology startups and could appear in the next revision of Beijing's export control catalogue.