--- date: 2026-10-29 subject: "Iluvatar claims H200-class GPU | PC making shifts back to China | Car memory prices soar" --- **Iluvatar CoreX demonstrated its Tiangai 300 GPU** for the first time, releasing third-party tests that put the chip's per-card throughput at 1.05 times Nvidia's H200 on some AI workloads. **HP, Asus and Acer are moving some PC production back to China** from Thailand and Vietnam as AI-driven memory shortages raise component costs. **Prices of car-grade DDR5 memory are up more than 300%** from a year earlier as AI servers absorb memory makers' production capacity. **Capacitors made entirely from domestic materials completed a batch trial** on State Grid's Zhangbei power line, replacing a resin film China previously imported in full. # Top Stories - **Chinese GPU designer Iluvatar CoreX claims its chip matches Nvidia's H200 on some AI work** — Iluvatar CoreX, a Chinese designer of graphics processors (GPUs) for AI, demonstrated its Tiangai 300 for the first time, releasing third-party tests that put per-card throughput at 1.05 times Nvidia's H200. By the figures Iluvatar disclosed, Chinese operators serving AI models in the setups tested would have a domestic chip that does the work of the Nvidia part. The company also says the chip natively supports the programming conventions of CUDA, the software most developers use to program Nvidia chips. It says mainstream AI frameworks have already been adapted to the chip. In its own training test, per-card throughput reached 1.33 times Nvidia's older H100. [InfoQ China](https://www.infoq.cn/article/tFaOHgBe8ENwteobTsLV) - **HP, Asus and Acer move some PC production back to China as memory costs climb** — PC makers HP, Asus and Acer are shifting some production from Thailand and Vietnam back to China to offset soaring component costs, Nikkei Asia reports, citing industry sources. The move partly reverses the "China+1" strategy under which PC makers built factories in Southeast Asia to reduce reliance on China, and it sends more PC orders to Chinese contract manufacturers. Shortages of memory and storage chips, driven by AI demand, have raised the cost of building PCs, and Dell is also considering a similar shift. Taiwan's big contract manufacturers, including Quanta, Compal, Inventec and Foxconn, are turning to higher-margin AI servers, opening room for Chinese rivals such as Luxshare, Huaqin Technology and Longcheer Technology. Nikkei says Chinese contract manufacturers also benefit from access to domestically made memory chips. [Nikkei Asia](https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/tech-asia/hp-and-asus-shift-some-pc-making-back-to-china-due-to-ai-driven-cost-hikes) [TrendForce](https://www.trendforce.com/news/2026/10/28/news-ai-driven-component-costs-reportedly-push-hp-asus-acer-to-shift-some-pc-production-back-to-china/) - **Car-grade memory chip prices jump as AI servers absorb production capacity** — Prices of automotive-grade DDR5 memory, the current mainstream generation, are up more than 300% from a year earlier because AI servers are taking up memory makers' production capacity, trade outlet EV Industry Net reports, citing Tencent News. Higher memory prices raise the cost of every smart car and fall hardest on cars that run AI language models on board, since those need the most memory. Memory chips now cost $90 to $220 per vehicle on mainstream mid- and high-end trims. NIO founder William Li said carmakers cannot outbid AI buyers for supply. Li Auto has warned that its 2026 memory-chip supply could cover less than half its needs. [EV Industry Net](https://www.evchanye.com/2026/1029/54686.shtml) - **State Grid institute's fully domestic capacitors complete batch trial on DC power line** — Capacitors made entirely from domestic materials, developed under State Grid's China Electric Power Research Institute, have completed batch demonstration use on the Zhangbei flexible direct-current (DC) transmission line, Science and Technology Daily reports. China previously imported all of the polypropylene resin film inside these capacitors, more than 150,000 metric tons worth over 2 billion yuan ($300 million) a year, so a domestic supply reduces reliance on those imports. Flexible DC lines use power-electronic converters to move large amounts of electricity over long distances, and capacitors are a core part of those converters. The hardest step in the program, begun in 2018 with partners including PetroChina Lanzhou Petrochemical, was purifying the resin to an ultra-clean grade. [Science and Technology Daily](https://epaper.stdaily.com/statics/technology-site/index.html#/home?isDetail=1¤tNewsId=9237fb77cb5742d4b67a19cab2899a7d¤tVersionName=03%C2%B7%E7%AC%AC03%E7%89%88%EF%BC%9A%E8%A6%81%20%E9%97%BB¤tVersion=3&timeValue=2026-10-29) [state media] # AI & Foundation Models - **Tencent opens its WorkBuddy AI agent workspace to outside agents and messaging apps** — Tencent cloud chief Dowson Tong said WorkBuddy, the company's workspace for AI agents that carry out multi-step tasks for users, will open to companies' own agents, third-party agents and outside messaging apps. Companies on WorkBuddy, which Tong says half of China's 500 largest firms use, will be able to run agents and models built outside Tencent. Tong also said Tencent Cloud and its Hunyuan model team raised one domestic chip's single-card throughput fivefold in the two weeks before Hunyuan Hy4 Preview launched, to absorb the surge in usage. Separately, Tencent Cloud helped a major international supplier of car systems deploy a cluster of a thousand domestic chips to train self-driving models. [The Paper](https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_34358254) [state-affiliated] # Chips & Semiconductors - **XHEART launches in-car AI chip it says carries China's first mass-produced Armv9 car processor** — Chinese chip designer XHEART launched the X7 Ultra, built to run large AI models in cars, and says it carries China's first mass-produced automotive-grade CPU on Armv9, Arm's newest processor architecture. Power and memory bandwidth, how fast data moves to and from memory, limit the language models a car can run, so a chip that claims to cut both widens that range. Against what it calls industry flagship products, XHEART says the chip uses 80% less memory bandwidth and doubles energy efficiency. The company says its design and software tools raise the size of model the chip can deploy tenfold. [ITHome](https://www.ithome.com/1/019/564.htm) # Quantum & Frontier Science - **Chinese university team makes carbon nanobelts that conduct electricity like metal** — A University of Science and Technology of China team made carbon ribbons less than a nanometer wide that conduct electricity like a metal, according to a paper published online in Nature. Chip wiring must narrow as chips shrink, and the team says the material could serve as atomic-scale wires in future carbon-based chips. Built only from five- and seven-membered rings of carbon atoms, the structure confirms a property theorists predicted in 1996 but that had long proved hard to make. The team, led by professors Wang Bing and Fan Qitang, assembled it in stages on a silver surface, heating chains of carbon rings until neighboring chains fused sideways like a zipper. [Xinhua](https://www.news.cn/20261029/5162d863462a47dab3664516b6538ad9/c.html) [state media] # Digital Infrastructure - **Yangzhou grid operator launches platform steering computing jobs into hours of cheap green power** — The Yangzhou branch of State Grid, China's national grid operator, has begun running what state media call China's first city-level platform matching computing demand with green power supply, electricity prices and carbon data. Steering AI training and other jobs that can wait into hours when renewable power is plentiful and cheap lowers both the cost and the emissions of computing. Some of those jobs can also be sent to renewable-rich western China under East Data, West Computing, the national program that sites data centers where power is plentiful. The platform already connects 24 pools of computing resources and more than 5,000 registered users. [Xinhua](https://www.news.cn/energy/20261029/e75296dd867548b3a79cc0352db0830f/c.html) [state media] - **Robot maker AgiBot releases robot operating system and will open-source it by year-end** — Chinese robot maker AgiBot released Link-U OS 1.0, an operating system covering everything from hardware control to applications, and plans to open-source its 200 million lines of code by the end of 2026. Opening a full robot software stack would let other robot makers build on code AgiBot says has already run on its mass-produced robots. The company says the system keeps variation in response time under 4 microseconds while running tasks 1,000 times a second, the predictable timing robot control depends on. AgiBot has donated the project to the OpenAtom Foundation and says the two will build a humanoid robot open-source community and help draft industry standards. [Sina Tech](https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/it/2026-10-29/doc-iniwwiez8903779.shtml) [state-affiliated] # Strategic Context - **China vows 'necessary measures' after U.S. bars imports from genomics group BGI** — China's foreign and commerce ministries said Beijing will take "necessary measures" after Washington barred imports from genomics group BGI and two affiliates. The listing shuts the companies' products out of the U.S. market, which BGI and MGI Tech, its maker of gene-sequencing machines, say accounts for only a small part of their business. The Department of Homeland Security placed them on the entity list kept under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, adding to existing limits on BGI's access to U.S. technology and government contracts. A commerce ministry spokesperson said the listing runs counter to the consensus reached by the two countries' heads of state. Both companies deny the allegations, and MGI Tech will contest the listing. [Guancha](https://www.guancha.cn/GuoJi%C2%B7ZhanLue/2026_10_29_906275.shtml) [state-affiliated]