The Chinese embassy in Washington said Beijing rejects attaching the AI OVERWATCH Act, the MATCH Act and the Chip Security Act to the U.S. National Defense Authorization Act, arguing that "arbitrary disruption and damage to the global industrial and supply chains serves no one's interest," per SCMP. The statement is Beijing's first formal reaction to the Senate manager's amendment covered in AIPD's July 15th edition, which would fold the AI OVERWATCH Act's export licensing regime for advanced AI chips, the MATCH Act's push on allied lithography sales and the Chip Security Act's chip location tracking requirement into the annual defense bill. The statement coincides with the World AI Conference in Shanghai, where Chinese officials are promoting an alternative "open" AI governance narrative. If enacted, the bundle would fix AI chip export rules in statute rather than in Commerce Department regulation, raising the bar for any future U.S. administration seeking to negotiate the controls back down.
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Anhui Korrun Co., a domestic luggage manufacturer, announced Thursday that its subsidiary Ningbo Purun holds a 0.0114% indirect stake in DeepSeek from an investment implying a post-money valuation of about 350.88 billion yuan ($52 billion), per Caixin. The Hangzhou-based lab's first outside round raised roughly 50 billion yuan (about $7 billion) against a 300 billion yuan (about $42 billion) pre-money valuation, with proceeds earmarked for team incentives and technical breakthroughs. Recent investment rounds show Chinese frontier labs financing their compute buildouts entirely from domestic capital as U.S. outbound investment rules keep American money out.
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Chinese frontier lab Zhipu AI has reached $1 billion in annual recurring revenue as of July, up 15-fold since January, according to sources familiar with the company cited by 36Kr. Zhipu went from $100 million to $1 billion in about five months, compared with 15 months at Anthropic. Zhipu began concentrating its model research on coding in early 2025, with founder Tang Jie framing "Coding and Reasoning" as the capabilities that pair with agents. The milestone comes days after Zhipu's HK$31.4 billion (about $4 billion) H-share placement covered in AIPD's July 13th edition. It gives Beijing a domestic frontier lab whose revenue base can now fund independent chip purchases even as U.S. export controls tighten access to advanced accelerators.
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Server maker Sugon put its Dawn 8000 super AI cluster on public display at the World AI Conference on Friday, per Pandaily. Every chip, computing unit, storage and networking layer is domestically developed, with a proprietary interconnect that ties all 100,000 accelerator cards into a single fabric, the report said. Sugon has been on the U.S. Commerce Department's Entity List since 2019, blocking its direct access to U.S. chips and design tools. The demonstration anchors Beijing's push to build a domestic training stack that does not rely on Nvidia hardware barred by U.S. export controls.
Read at Pandaily ↗