China Companies

ByteDance is a Chinese internet company founded in 2012, whose AI work includes the Doubao chatbot, the TRAE coding tool, the Seed model team and the Volcano Engine cloud platform.[^1]

UBTECH Robotics is a robot company founded in March 2012 that moved from small humanoid robots to full-size industrial humanoids, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2023, and began mass production delivery of its Walker S2 robot in 2025.

Chinese supplier of advanced driver assistance and automated driving systems for passenger cars, founded in 2015, the largest domestic provider by installation volume, and listed in Hong Kong in 2024.

A Chinese robotics company established in Hangzhou in 2016 that designs and builds quadruped and humanoid robots, selling them at both low starting prices and industrial contract scale.

Chinese humanoid robotics company founded in February 2023 by Peng Zhihui, a former Huawei "genius youth"; it builds complete robots and their joint modules, and aims to push hardware costs below 200,000 yuan.

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company founded in Hangzhou in July 2023 as a spin-off of the AGI research lab of High-Flyer, a hedge fund. It releases its main models with open weights.

The State Council is China's Central People's Government: the executive body of the highest organ of state power and the highest organ of state administration, led by a Premier who assumes overall responsibility.

Huawei is a Chinese information and communications technology company founded in Shenzhen in 1987. It designs its own Ascend AI chips and the software and large computing systems built around them.

Tencent is a Chinese internet company founded in 1998, known for QQ, WeChat and video games. Since 2023 its Hunyuan model line has been its main AI effort, later branded Hy.

iFlytek is a Chinese information technology company founded in 1999 and headquartered in Hefei. It is known for speech technology and for its Spark large language models, first released on 6 May 2023.

Alibaba Group is a technology company founded in 1999 that describes itself as focused on AI + Cloud and commerce; its Qwen models and data centre build-out are central to that positioning.

Baidu is a Beijing-based Chinese internet company founded in 2000. It runs China's dominant search engine and develops the ERNIE model family and the ERNIE Bot chatbot.

A department of China's State Council, established in March 2008 to administer industry, communications and informatisation. It consolidated industrial and information-technology functions that had previously been spread across several government bodies.

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group and the developer of the Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) large language model family, which is released as both open weights and proprietary models.

Kuaishou Technology is a Beijing-based short-video and live-streaming company, founded in 2011 as GIF Kuaishou. It listed in Hong Kong in 2021 and builds the Kling video generation model.

The State Internet Information Office — the Cyberspace Administration of China — is the Chinese body that manages online information content, from news licensing and website enforcement to algorithm rules and AI content labeling.

Insilico Medicine is a drug discovery company founded in the United States in 2014 that pairs an AI software platform, Pharma.AI, with its own pipeline of drug programmes and automated laboratory work.

A Chinese chip designer founded in 2014 that builds x86-compatible processors and DCU accelerators, listed on the STAR Market in 2022 and positioning itself around a self-developed C86 plus GPGPU product line.

SenseTime is a Chinese AI company founded in October 2014 and listed in Hong Kong at the end of 2021. It develops the SenseNova large models and, in 2026, reported its first IFRS net profit since listing.

Fourier is a Shanghai robotics company founded in 2015 by Gu Jie. It began with rehabilitation robots and exoskeletons, then released the GR-1, GR-2 and GR-3 full-size humanoid robots in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Li Auto is a Chinese automaker that describes itself as a pioneer in commercialising extended-range electric vehicles in China. It sells extended-range and battery-electric family vehicles and has built a large delivery, retail and charging footprint.

Momenta is a Chinese "physical AI" company founded in 2016 by Cao Xudong that supplies driving software to carmakers around the world, and it listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July 2026.

A Chinese AI chip company founded in 2016 and listed on the STAR Market in 2020. It designs cloud, edge and endpoint chips, and in 2025 it turned profitable as revenue rose sharply.

Pony.ai is an autonomous driving company founded in Fremont, California, in late 2016. It runs robotaxi, robotruck and personal-vehicle businesses on a common "virtual driver" system, and operates in both California and China.

WeRide is an autonomous driving company founded in Silicon Valley in 2017 by Tony Han, formerly chief scientist of Baidu's autonomous driving unit. Its WeRide One platform spans L2 to L4 autonomy, and its vehicles run in more than 60 cities.

An annual artificial intelligence conference held in Shanghai since 2018, co-hosted by Chinese government bodies and the Shanghai municipal government, combining forums, exhibitions and signed investment projects.

Zhipu AI, also known as Z.ai, is a Beijing company founded in 2019 as a Tsinghua University spin-out. It develops the GLM model family and related chatbot, video, agent and coding products, and listed in Hong Kong in January 2026.

Chinese chip designer founded in 2019 that builds general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) chips and intelligent computing solutions on its self-developed BILI series hardware and BIRENSUPA software, for AI training and inference from cloud to edge.

Chinese GPU company Moore Threads, founded in 2020 by former Nvidia China head Zhang Jianzhong, sells AI accelerator cards, servers and clusters built on its MUSA architecture. It listed on the STAR Market in 2025 and is growing fast while still loss-making.

Kunlunxin is the AI chip company spun out of Baidu in April 2021, continuing Baidu's Kunlun chip line. It designs processors for AI workloads in data centres and is one of China's largest domestic AI chip suppliers.

MiniMax is a Shanghai-based AI company founded in December 2021 by computer-vision researchers from SenseTime. It builds text, speech and video models and consumer apps such as Talkie and Hailuo AI, and listed in Hong Kong in January 2026.

Manus is a Singapore-based AI startup, founded in Beijing as Butterfly Effect in 2022, that builds AI agents. Meta agreed to buy it for about $2 billion, the deal was blocked in China, and it later returned to independence.

PixVerse, founded in 2023 as Aishi Technology, is an AI video generation company whose in-house models power a web app, an API and agent tools; a March 2026 Series C made it a unicorn.

Chinese generative-AI company founded in March 2023 that built the Vidu video model and now describes two lines of work: world generation models and world action models.

Chinese AI company founded in Beijing in 2023 by Tsinghua schoolfriends Yang Zhilin, Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin; maker of the long-context Kimi assistant and the K-series models, and one of China's fastest-rising model developers by valuation.

01.AI is a Beijing-based artificial intelligence company founded in 2023 by Kai-Fu Lee. It builds open and closed large language models, including the Yi series, and the Wanzhi enterprise platform.

StepFun (阶跃星辰) is a Shanghai AI company founded in April 2023 by former Microsoft staff. It builds multimodal Step-series models and has open-sourced several of them.

Baichuan Intelligence (百川智能) is a Beijing AI company founded in April 2023 by Wang Xiaochuan. It released open-source language models from 2023 and later focused on applying AI to healthcare.

The National Development and Reform Commission is a ministerial-level department of China's State Council that drafts and implements economic and social development plans, manages investment and coordinates macro-economic policy. It descends from the State Planning Commission established in 1952.

Baidu Research is the research arm of Baidu, built around the Institute of Deep Learning founded in 2013, with laboratories in Beijing and Silicon Valley; in 2014 Andrew Ng became chief scientist in charge of the whole organisation.

Ant Group is the company whose InclusionAI team released the open-weight Ling (Bailing) family of mixture-of-experts language models in 2025, including Ling-Lite and Ling-Plus, trained without premium GPUs and published under the MIT licence.

Meituan's LongCat team released LongCat-Flash, a 560-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts language model that activates roughly 27 billion parameters per token on average and ships with open weights under the MIT licence.

A public research university in Beijing's Haidian district, founded in 1911 as Tsinghua College. It is now a major centre for computer science and AI research, with which Turing laureate Andrew Yao, ResNet author Kaiming He and spin-out Zhipu AI are associated.

Microsoft Research Asia is Microsoft's research laboratory in the Asia-Pacific region, founded in Beijing in November 1998. It works on artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and related fields, and its researchers have included the first author of the ResNet paper.

A Chinese consumer electronics and smart manufacturing company built around smartphones, smart hardware and its AIoT platform, listed in Hong Kong in 2018 and extending its engineering into quadruped and humanoid robots.

Megvii is a Chinese computer vision company founded in 2011 by three Tsinghua graduates. Its Face++ cloud platform opened face recognition to developers, and it was the earliest founded of the "CV four little dragons."

Huawei's artificial intelligence research centre, founded in 2012 and part of the company's 2012 Laboratories, with sites in China, Hong Kong, Europe and Canada and research spanning vision, language, search and recommendation, and decision-making.

Yitu Technology is a Chinese computer vision company founded in September 2012 by Zhu Long and Lin Chenxi. It is counted among the "CV four little dragons", alongside Megvii, SenseTime and CloudWalk, that grew out of computer vision in China's early AI industry.

XPENG is a Chinese maker of smart electric vehicles founded in 2014 and headquartered in Guangzhou, which has extended its in-house AI work to humanoid robots, new driving models and robotaxi plans.

CloudWalk Technology is a Chinese AI company built on academic face recognition research. Founded in April 2015, it was the last of the four Chinese computer vision firms known as the "CV four little dragons" to be established.

Chinese medical-AI company founded in 2016 that focuses on AI for diagnosing and treating coronary heart disease, and says it holds China's first class III AI medical device certificate.

T-Head Semiconductor is Alibaba's chip design unit, founded in 2018. It has released the Hanguang 800 AI inference chip, the Yitian 710 server CPU and the Zhenwu PPU AI processor, which Alibaba uses at scale for its Qwen models.

MetaX is a Shanghai-based GPU chip company founded in September 2020 that designs full-stack GPU chips and solutions; it is counted among China's four leading GPU startups and listed on the STAR Market in December 2025.

Langboat Technology is a Chinese AI company founded in June 2021 and incubated at Sinovation Ventures; it develops the in-house Mengzi model family and sells an enterprise agent platform and applications built on it.

A Chinese AI company founded in 2022 under Tsinghua associate professor Liu Zhiyuan, known for the MiniCPM on-device model series, multimodal and speech models, and the ForgeTrain training framework.

Galbot is a robotics company founded in 2023 that builds general-purpose robots around an embodied foundation model, with its AstraBrain model family, a large-scale data infrastructure and deployed robots in several industries.

Peking University is a Chinese university that dates its founding to 1898 and reported 53,946 full-time students in a January 2026 snapshot; in September 2020 Zhu Songchun was named to lead its Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

A large comprehensive research university in China, with 47 schools, 16 disciplines on the national Double First-Class list, more graduate than undergraduate students, and 36 members of the national academies on its staff.

Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR) is an applied AI research institute set up under Zhang Yaqin, targeting the fourth industrial revolution through autonomous driving, AI plus IoT and brain-inspired intelligence.

BIGAI is a non-profit AI research institute in Beijing, led by Zhu Songchun, that works with Peking and Tsinghua universities toward a unified theory of general intelligence and general intelligent agents.

UCLA is the University of California's Los Angeles campus. Its own figures show a large, heavily undergraduate institution: 46,678 students in total, most of them Californians, taught by 5,464 faculty.

A Chinese artificial intelligence infrastructure company that builds the middle layer letting many models run on many kinds of chips, and also releases the open Megrez model family.