Organizations shaping AI

Astribot

Shenzhen-based humanoid-robotics startup founded by Lai Jie, formerly of Tencent's robotics lab. Builds the Astribot S1, a high-speed dual-arm humanoid robot for everyday physical tasks.

Concordia AI is a Beijing- and Singapore-based social enterprise founded by Brian Tse, focused on AI safety and governance research and facilitating international cooperation between AI communities, particularly between China and the West.

Chinese robotics company (CloudMinds) building cloud-connected service and humanoid robots on its HARIX cloud-AI operating system.

DiDi

DiDi (DiDi Chuxing) is a Chinese ride-hailing company headquartered in Beijing, founded in 2012 by Cheng Wei. Its DiDi Autonomous Driving unit develops self-driving technology as a separate division.

Chinese robotics company in Shanghai, that began in rehabilitation robotics and now builds the GR-series humanoid robots.

HiDream develops open and commercial foundation models for visual generation and editing. Its model families include HiDream-I1 and HiDream-O1-Image, which use diffusion-based architectures for text-to-image generation and multimodal image tasks.

Chinese AI company specialising in speech recognition and natural-language processing.

Chinese AI infrastructure startup with roots at Tsinghua University, building efficient compute and inference systems for large models.

Kepler Robotics

Chinese humanoid-robotics company (Shanghai Kepler Robotics) building the Forerunner series of "blue-collar" humanoid robots for manufacturing and logistics.

Kuaishou operates a global short-video and content platform whose recommendation, creation and advertising systems draw heavily on machine learning. It also develops Kling, a family of generative video models offered as a standalone product.

Leju Robotics is a humanoid-robotics company based in Shenzhen, China. It develops the full-size Kuavo humanoid robot, released in 2023 as one of China's first open-source humanoids.

Chinese super-app and on-demand local-services platform (food delivery, retail, travel), founded in 2010.

Chinese large-language-model startup spun out of Tsinghua University, developer of the MiniCPM family of models.

Moore Threads is a Chinese GPU design company headquartered in Beijing founded by Zhang Jianzhong, a former Nvidia China executive. It develops full-function GPUs for graphics and AI computing.

Develops open-source language models and toolkits that lower the cost and complexity of training, adapting, compressing, and running large models, supported by Tsinghua's NLP lab and ModelBest.

Chinese humanoid-robotics company developing general-purpose robots.

Chinese AI video-generation startup, founded in Beijing by Yue Cao (a core author of Swin Transformer), developer of the open-source Magi autoregressive video model.

Chinese humanoid-robotics company (Titanium Tiger Robotics) in Shanghai by Yi Gang, specialising in lightweight robot joint modules and humanoid robots.

WeRide is an autonomous-driving company headquartered in Guangzhou, China offering robotaxi, robobus, robovan, and robosweeper products. It listed on NASDAQ in 2024 (ticker WRD).

Electronics- and information-focused university with a dedicated School of Artificial Intelligence. Research includes intelligent perception, image understanding, computer vision, machine learning, remote sensing, and intelligent systems.