This weekend, Shanghai is hosting the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), bringing together over 800 companies, including Chinese tech giants Huawei and Alibaba, as well as global players like Tesla and Amazon. The event showcases China's accelerating progress in AI despite ongoing U.S. sanctions.
Chinese Premier Li Qiang is expected to inaugurate the event, highlighting AI as a core pillar of China’s 2030 technology strategy. Although the U.S. has restricted exports of advanced chips and AI tools over national security concerns, the scale of this conference underscores China’s resilience and innovation in the field.
Startups such as DeepSeek have drawn global attention by developing AI models comparable to top U.S. systems at a fraction of the cost. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently described China’s AI development as “world-class,” a sentiment that resonated widely across international media.
Over 3,000 AI products, 40 language models, and 60 robots are on display, signaling China’s deep commitment to artificial intelligence and its determination to remain a formidable force in the global AI race, even under escalating technological restrictions.