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Bottom Line Up Front China's top economic planner will speed work on a foundational AI law with life-cycle safety standards and ethics rules, an official at the National Development and Reform Commission said. A Yunnan Germanium unit agreed to sell 900,000 indium phosphide wafers to U.S. optical component maker Applied Optoelectronics, though deliveries depend on Chinese export license approvals. Envision put an 800-volt direct-current power system into commercial operation under real AI training load at its Galaxy AI data center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, the Chinese energy technology group said. DeepSeek plans to train its next model, V5, mainly on Huawei's Ascend 950 chips in 2027, CnBeta reports, citing industry sources. |
| China's economic planner pledges faster work on a foundational AI law An official at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China's top economic planner, said China will speed work on a foundational AI law with life-cycle safety standards and ethics rules. A foundational law would give the obligations on AI developers and operators, now spread across separate rules for algorithms, deepfakesDeepfakeSynthetic audio, images or video that realistically depict a real person saying or doing something they did not. Non-consensual intimate deepfakes and election deepfakes are the two areas where states and Congress have actually passed laws. and generative AI, a common legal basis. The NDRC will also support sector-specific AI "regulatory sandboxesSandboxIsolated computing environment where an agent can run code and use tools without touching the machine underneath," supervised settings where companies test products before rules are fixed, and push developers to report safety incidents and vulnerabilities. It will further push for model trainers and data labeling workers to be added to China's national occupational classification. |
| Chinese supplier agrees to sell 900,000 indium phosphide wafers to U.S. optics maker AOI Yunnan Lincang Xinyuan Germanium said its subsidiary Yunnan Xinyao signed a long term agreement under which U.S. optical component maker Applied Optoelectronics (AOI) is expected to buy 900,000 indium phosphide wafers from 2027 through 2031. Actual prices and delivery volumes depend on later annual contracts, purchase orders and export license approvals. Indium phosphide wafers are the base on which the lasers and light detectors in fiber-optic links are built. A separate 2027 contract sets AOI's first year purchase at 180,000 wafers, one-fifth of the total, for $194.4 million before tax, with the final amount tied to the quantity export licenses approve and to purchase orders. |
| Energy firm Envision runs AI data center on 800-volt DC power under live load Chinese energy technology group Envision said its 800-volt direct-current (DC) power system is in commercial operation at its Galaxy AI data center in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, running under real AI training load. Training makes a data center's power draw swing within milliseconds. The system converts grid power to DC in one step and absorbs those swings with on-site batteries before they reach the grid. DatacenterDynamics, a trade publication, said it knows of no other data center in the world running an 800-volt DC setup. The campus opened in August and is planned for 3 gigawatts, enough for up to 1 million AI chips. More than 80% of its power is expected to come directly from renewables. |
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| Industry ministry and seven other agencies set 2030 goal for China's basic materials, parts and processes China's industry ministry (MIIT) and seven other agencies released a plan Oct. 22 to bring China's basic industrial capabilities, including the materials, components and processes that manufacturing depends on, to the international advanced level overall by 2030, Science and Technology Daily reports. The plan calls for a competitiveness survey system and a rolling catalog of basic products. Its forward-looking tasks extend to quantum technology, brain-computer interfaces and sixth-generation mobile networks (6G). |
| Science ministry names Guangdong lead for two national research projects China's Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), which oversees national research funding, is backing Guangdong's provincial government to lead two national key projects, in advanced biotherapy and in building the Greater Bay Area's innovation center. Science and Technology Daily calls the arrangement an important measure in reforming the national key research program for the 2026-2030 plan period and says it is the first time a local government has led such projects. The projects launched Sunday at the Greater Bay Area Science Forum in Guangzhou, where national ministries and central agencies also released measures backing the region in quantum technology, brain-computer interfaces and biomanufacturing. |
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| III | AI & FOUNDATION MODELS | |
DeepSeek reportedly plans to train its next model on Huawei's Ascend chipsChinese AI developer DeepSeek plans to train V5, the next model whose code placeholders CTD reported in the October 28th edition, mainly on Huawei's Ascend 950 AI chips in 2027, according to a CnBeta report citing industry sources quoted by other media. Training a large model demands more computing powerComputeThe processing power used to train and run AI models, usually measured in chips, GPU-hours or FLOPs., chip-to-chip communication and cluster stability than running one. The report says Ascend chips have so far mainly handled DeepSeek's inferenceInferenceRunning a trained AI model to answer a query, as distinct from training it. Inference is where most ongoing compute and energy demand now sits, and it is what chip export rules increasingly target alongside training., the running of finished models. Core teams from both companies are stationed in Hangzhou and adapted the model's low-level computing routines to Huawei hardware during work on V4, the report says. |
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| Chinese satellite firm Star Vision signs Oman constellation deal it bills as a sector first Star Vision, based in Hangzhou, said it signed a space AI agreement Nov. 2 with Oman Lens, an Omani satellite data company founded in 2023 as a joint venture between Star Vision and Mars Development and Investment Company. Star Vision calls the deal Chinese commercial space's first constellation export. If that description holds, a Chinese commercial company would build a whole satellite constellation for a foreign company it helped found. Star Vision's announcement puts the first batch at 20 satellites. Radio Merge, an Omani outlet, puts the first phase at seven satellites and reports the agreements also provide for a satellite assembly and testing center in Oman. |
| Commercial rocket Kinetica-2 lofts 18 Qianfan internet satellites in one batch Commercial launch company CAS Space's Kinetica-2 rocket placed all 18 satellites of a batch for Qianfan, a Chinese low-orbit satellite internet constellation, into planned orbit on its second flight, TMTPost reports. Networks like Qianfan need large numbers of satellites in orbit, so each rocket able to carry a full batch adds to the launch capacity available to deploy them. The mission released all 18 satellites at once by rotating the stack and letting inertia separate them, the rocket's first use of that approach in place of mechanical release. Chief designer Yang Haoliang said China's satellite internet buildout faces heavy launch demand and a still-large gap in satellites deployed. |
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| Premier Li Qiang says China opposes a "digital iron curtain" Premier Li Qiang told the opening of the World Internet Conference's Wuzhen Summit that China will promote technology transfer and knowledge sharing and opposes building a "digital iron curtain," Xinhua reports. The keynote is the head of government's own statement of the terms on which China offers digital cooperation abroad, pairing technology sharing pledges with support for digital infrastructure in developing countries. Li placed the iron curtain phrase under digital security, pledging to respect other countries' legitimate cybersecurity concerns. Li also said humans must keep control over machines and algorithms must follow shared human values. Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Diaz and heads of international organizations including the United Nations were among about 1,800 attendees. |
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