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.

RT @JohnReedwrites: Cc: India Inc.China is going big into the business of lab-grown diamonds, my colleague @EleanorOlcott reports.

Today, most synthetic diamonds are grown in China using the “high pressure, high temperature method”. However, increasingly, manufacturers are using the “chemical vapour deposition method” for larger gems, which builds diamonds layer by layer in a microwave chamber. Graphic

Zhengzhou makes your iPhone. Now the central Chinese city is churning out cheap lab-grown diamonds for your engagement ring. The prices for synthetic diamonds have plummeted, falling by nearly 90% over the past five years. It is cheaper than ever to buy sparkling stones that.

Answering questions for an hour outside on summer afternoon in Beijing. He does have stamina.

That the Chinese trade negotiators put H20 on the table during talks suggests they're fully aware that domestic chips aren't ready to replace Nvidia. Says a lot.

RT @vittorfernando:

Still yet to talk to any engineers here who say Huawei Ascend working for AI training. It’s ok for inference on small models. DeepSeek doing all of their R2 training on Nvidia, can still get hands on enough H100s to scale up their cluster.

Last year, China's parcel delivery industry handled 174.5 BILLION packages — equivalent to more than 124 per person.

From the archives.

Happy to be nominated for SOPA Young Journalist alongside fellow badass China tech reporter @QianerLiu.

Original story:

Luckin Coffee is opening its first US store in New York in the coming weeks, six months after we reported that the once disgraced coffee chain was plotting its American debut. Luckin had floated the idea of changing its name in the US to disassociate from its accounting.

RT @leylaboulton: Where will the US-China rollercoaster take us all? Join us on 28 May and put your questions to our expert panel for @FT….

RT @Dimi: SCOOP - Treasury secretary Bessent & Chinese finance minister Lan held a #secretmeeting in the IMF basement 3 weeks ago that help….

RT @edwardwhitenz: The making of the first electro state: Xi's aggressive pursuit of energy self-sufficiency could give China the upper han….

NEW: Huawei is building a 7nm fab in Shenzhen for its smartphone and Ascend chips, its first effort to manufacture its own high-end chips. The Guanlan site is part of a sprawling network of new chip manufacturing sites all working on various elements of Huawei's push to become.

RT @Jukanlosreve: Some updates regarding Huawei's Ascend 910C. According to engineers, porting a model from CUDA to CANN requires a team of….

XJP enters the AI vortex

An executive of a sanctioned AI company complained to me that they were "sanctioned from profiting from human rights abuses". But after the local government failed to pay their bills, there was no "profit to speak of".

Beijing's cherry blossom season reminded me that I'd passed the year of living in this city. The flowers were in full bloom when I moved here from Hong Kong last April, adding colour to the capital's monotone streets. Time has gone by quickly, accelerated by the dizzying pace of.