Eleanor Olcott
@EleanorOlcott
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China Tech Correspondent @FT based in Beijing email: eleanor.olcott (@) https://t.co/gnV7VRHnX3 DM for alt contact
Beijing
Joined January 2015
While the world has been hunting for clues about the mysterious DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, I hopped on a plane down to Guangdong to visit the village where he grew up. Liang returned to Mililing 米历岭村 for the Lunar New Year celebration with his family this week.
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“Many of the leading figures in China’s chip industry began their careers at Nvidia, AMD or Intel. Leading technical figures at Chinese chipmakers Moore Threads, Biren and Cambricon all worked previously at Nvidia.” @EleanorOlcott @zijing_wu
ft.com
The country has been a critical market for the AI chipmaker but the company is entangled in geopolitical tensions and is watching the rise of new rivals
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I went to Zhengzhou to interview factory workers at the world’s largest iPhone factory. @chinalaborwatch just published an investigative report on working conditions at the Foxconn factory that found persistent problems with withheld pay, high dependency on dispatch workers and
Great work from @chinalaborwatch and @FT reporter @EleanorOlcott Inside China’s mega iPhone factory: long hours, discrimination and delayed pay https://t.co/8Zu8VWTnTj via @ft Quick thread on some highlights below 🧵
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A China Labor Watch six-month investigation at Foxconn's Zhengzhou iPhone factory finds tough working conditions for seasonal staff building the latest iPhones (@eleanorolcott / Financial Times) https://t.co/efh8NAPHmu
https://t.co/9sIe8kc7AE
techmeme.com
Eleanor Olcott / Financial Times: A China Labor Watch six-month investigation at Foxconn's Zhengzhou iPhone factory finds tough working conditions for seasonal staff building the latest iPhones
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The @FT is out today with an important story on how China is adapting its data center buildouts to account for both the coming boom in inference demand and the sting of U.S. export controls. https://t.co/fM6KOwGM0c
ft.com
Beijing increases oversight of its data centres to make better use of limited computing resources
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‘Stargate of China’ plan emerges to challenge US as AI superpower
ft.com
Beijing increases oversight of its data centres to make better use of limited computing resources
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Shandong-based 🇨🇳 Goertek (歌尔) has increased its stranglehold over the smart glasses industry as well as the supply chain around Meta’s AI-powered spectacles through a spate of dealmaking. Goertek is manufacturing the forthcoming iteration of Meta’s smart glasses, dubbed
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Quite a hot mic moment on CCTV in Beijing today as Putin and Xi, both 72 years old, are caught casually talking about living to 150 and maybe forever thanks to organ transplants. (As picked up by Bloomberg.)
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When I visited Los Angeles as an adult for the first time, it very much reminded me of Beijing
Yao Yang on Why Shanghai Wins Over Beijing In a viral video, the renowned economist outlined deep differences in urban livability, architecture, and culture—touching a nerve that reveals broader divides between the two top Chinese mainland cities. https://t.co/SwYJsLS8wF
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HUAWEI has something similar It's called UB over Ethernet, along with a tunable optical splitter before the modulator to reduce jitter They have already done distributed training thru a different software
You have scale-up, scale-out, and now scale-across. @NVIDIA moat widens with Spectrum-XGS Ethernet that can tie GPU clusters together across distributed locations. GPU super clusters can now be tied between hyperscalers, neoclouds, etc. Wild. https://t.co/415uq919Wu
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Beijing tech circles are hardly representative, but smartglasses are noticeably more common this year. I still haven't seen a pair that I would say is stylish, but assessing from what most owners are wearing on the rest of their bodies, this probably doesn't matter too much.
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It's been over six months since DeepSeek launched R1, and the world is still waiting for its successor model from China's AI darling. In the meantime, many developers have shifted to Alibaba's Qwen3 series, which adapted many of R1's core ideas but made it easier and cheaper to
ft.com
Difficulties of training the start-up’s latest system with Huawei’s semiconductors highlight dependence on Nvidia
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I took a break from reporting on tech and returned to my beloved side beat as China Caffeine correspondent. Luckin Coffee's US launch has attracted an unprecedented amount of press attention since the FT first reported that it would launch there. Luckin Coffee has welcomed the
ft.com
The coffee chain is coming after Starbucks but its business model is not easily replicated across the Pacific
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“Luckin prefers to describe itself as a technology company that happens to sell coffee “ - @EleanorOlcott on why Luckin Coffee’s business model might translate to the US
ft.com
The coffee chain is coming after Starbucks but its business model is not easily replicated across the Pacific
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Not to dismiss the very real economic pain *a lot* of people in China are facing, but for many middle class urbanites the pessimism comes from not being able to move upward the way their parents’ generation did—which was, by all accounts, an absolute rarity in human history
when you hear stuff about how china is in the "garbage times of history", young people have no hope, lying flat etc. this vibe is real but also at least some of it is the trauma response of the first generation since the 1990s to not be caught up in delirious madcap reform growth
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A GLP-1 salesperson in China told me that the weight-loss companies are struggling to convince big-bellied Chinese men, who are prime candidates for the drug, that they need to slim down their midriff. They are proud of their Beijing bikinis.
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Feels like a good moment to reshare my long profile of Lip-Bu Tan written a few weeks ago. Let's not let ignorance reign supreme.
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🎯🎯🎯🎯
This is an important report from @EleanorOlcott not just for what it says about China’s semiconductor industry but also what it says about China’s industrial policy more generally: https://t.co/Lcyf578pTV Beijing often tries to push consolidation in strategic
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Beijing wants to consolidate the semiconductor industry. But that doesn’t mean it can. At the start of the year, the NDRC convened a group of chip equipment manufacturers to discuss the possibility of a mega-merger that consolidates fragmented technologies into one state-backed
ft.com
Beijing wants ‘megamergers’ to help fragmented sector face large US and European rivals
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One thing I think people misunderstand the consolidation of China's semi is, it is true that there is a general sense that 1) chip sector need to consolidate 2) solid feasibility of more consolidation But the actually execution of M&A in China's chip industry is much more
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