An interactive display featuring artificial intelligence at the iRootech Technology Co. office in Guangzhou, China, Wednesday, April 15, 2026.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Hello, I’m Evelyn. I am writing to you from Beijing. Welcome to the latest edition of The China Connection. This is a concise summary of what I have seen and heard from local companies.
In Hangzhou, startups are working on both software and hardware to build devices that run AI. How will this change the AI technology race?
big story
As Chinese cloud companies rushed to promote OpenClaw in early March, a Hangzhou startup was already developing a device.
EinClaw shipped its first 100 units on Friday, a $43 clip-on microphone that allows users to send voice commands to the OpenClaw AI agent. Just two people developed and assembled the device using parts sourced from all over China, co-founder Ervin Chen told me when I visited his WeWork-style office in Hangzhou last week.
OpenClaw functionality is also available on robots. In nearby Suzhou, startup JoyIn claims its Zeroth M1 humanoid is the first to do so. use tencent Cloud tools allow people to send commands to robots and control them remotely, the company said. Pre-orders are expected to begin by July.
Taken together, these represent an industry-wide shift from internet-only AI to hardware.
“Cloud native is a little outdated. The technology is convenient, but the business model is a little outdated,” Lei Fung, founder, CEO and chairman of Tencent-backed Open Pie, told me last week. “Data sovereignty is a concern right now.”
That’s a big announcement from a startup founded to build cloud data systems.
China’s millions of factories demonstrate the limits of cloud-only AI. Although manufacturers are interested in making AI more efficient, they are concerned about sending sensitive information to the cloud, Fung said. So OpenPie is building devices that can run AI tools locally using low-cost Chinese chips, he said.
The goal is to ship 10,000 of these boxes at 100,000 yuan ($14,627) by the end of this year before scaling up, Fung said.
Expanding into the physical world is also transforming software-first companies like Style3D, which started in 2015 using AI to help apparel companies speed up their design-to-production processes.
So many companies asked Style3D for data about physical materials and textures that the company decided to go into business for itself — launching the robotics platform SynReal last fall, CEO Eric Liu told me Thursday on the sidelines of the Hangzhou Venture Capital Association conference. He says that for humanoid robots to function properly in the real world, they will need a specialized set of texture information to understand items from oranges to silk scarves, and his company can provide that data.
Startups aren’t the only ones chasing hardware trends. Electric vehicle companies, including German automaker Volkswagen, announced last week that they would deploy in-vehicle AI tools that respond to drivers’ voice commands.
alibabahas primarily focused on in-app AI tools, but this month it also revealed that its mapping division, Amap, is developing a four-legged robot.
Once again, the company aims to use specialized data from 20 years of digital mapping to gain an edge in robotics. Given the shortage of guide dogs in China, its initial goal is to assist the visually impaired.
Mu Xu, head of embodied AI algorithms at Amap, said map data helps robot sensors navigate, while AI tools can help robots find nearby convenience stores, for example, based on prompts such as “I’m thirsty.”
But he warned that, especially for robotics, the ability to handle strong AI on the device will be critical and poses the biggest challenge.
Once this constraint is resolved, the question becomes not how capable an AI model is theoretically capable, but what the technology can do within every appliance.
need to know
Foreign car companies bet on technology to hang on to once-lucrative Chinese car market
U.S., South Korean and German automakers are rushing to unveil new model lineups for China in time for the Beijing auto show, which opened on Friday, using AI developed locally by ByteDance and other Chinese companies.
Prime Minister Trudeau says economic coercion from the U.S. and Europe has left Canada ‘almost in the hands of China’
Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE in Singapore on Thursday that economic coercion from the United States is pushing Canadian companies to do business with China.
Singapore’s foreign minister warns that Hormuz Island is just a ‘dry run’ if China and the US go to war in the Pacific
If war breaks out between China and the United States in the Pacific, “what we’re seeing in the Strait of Hormuz would be a dry run,” Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said on CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE on Wednesday.
very soon
April 30: Official Purchasing Managers Index for April
May 1st: RatingDog China’s April Manufacturing PMI
May 1: Hong Kong stock market closed for Labor Day holiday
May 1-5: Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges closed for Labor Day holiday
