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DeepSeek and 7 Other China Tech Titans Taking Over the World (Tech Strategy)

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China’s tech companies are making big strides in artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, robotics, and electric vehicles (EVs).

And they are going global. Most are aiming for domestic plus international leadership. Just like their Silicon Valley counterparts have long done.

The difference is China has scale in both software and hardware. And in industrial capacity. We’re seeing this unique advantage play out in drones, robots, and EVs.

So, I thought I would point out eight Chinese tech leaders to watch.

They are all pretty cool. And I think most of them are probably going to win big internationally.

1. DeepSeek

This week, everyone has been looking up DeepSeek and its founder Liang Wenfeng. Without much fanfare, this Hangzhou-based AI firm just released DeepSeek R1 and shocked Silicon Valley.

Their newest LLM R1 is a real challenge to OpenAI. It is matching OpenAI’s o1 models in tests, especially in math and logic. And everyone seems to agree its performance is at a really high level.

But it the fact that it is open source that really has everyone’s attention. And apparently it can run on a home computer. In that sense, it is what OpenAI was always supposed to be (i.e., open).

And it is about 3-5% of the cost. That is amazing. Intelligence has fallen to the cost of compute. Which appears to be close to the cost of electricity. This is how you win in most of the world.

DeepSeek is a pretty interesting company. It was founded in 2015 to do quantitative trading, sort of similar to Renaissance Technologies in the US. But it got hit with some regulatory changes and pivoted to artificial general intelligence in 2023. The rapid advancements of its GenAI models is pretty amazing.

It’s free and you can try it here:

It’s pretty fantastic. I use this and Hugging Face chat for most of my general inquiries.

2. Alibaba Cloud (and Qwen)

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group. It is one of the largest cloud service providers in the world. And arguably the leader in Asia.

That made it an important business (like AWS and Azure) before GenAI. But now it has become much more so.

And Alibaba Cloud has gone “all in” on becoming a foundational technology in GenAI. They have launched Qwen and an entire suite of large language models (LLMs). They are mostly open source and are on the frontier in terms of performance. They are one of the most used models on Hugging Face.

Additionally, Alibaba Cloud has their own semiconductors. They have model-as-a-service tools such as ModelScope. They are going for the full AI tech stack.

I recently interviewed Dongliang Guo, the head of Alibaba Cloud international. Which was mostly me trying to get a sense of adoption of Qwen by industries. And in China vs. Asia and beyond. You can find that article here.

And you can try Qwen here.

3. Baidu AI Cloud (and Ernie)

Baidu, which has long been referred to as China’s Google, is a powerhouse in AI and increasingly in AI cloud services. CEO Robin Li has been making big strategic investments in AI research and development for about 10 years. Keep in mind, he has been in algorithms since the mid 1990’s and Google’s original PageRank algorithm cited his work.

Baidu’s AI research has been full stack. They have been building everything from apps to semiconductors and servers. And up until recently, this was mostly being leveraged into their search engine and other mobile apps. Their big growth vertical was autonomous vehicles.

And then GenAI landed in 2022. Baidu rapidly pivoted and made GenAI plus cloud their big new thing. They were 100% in the right place at the right time. Especially since autonomous driving has been slow to deploy in China.

Baidu AI Cloud, the company’s cloud services division, now offers a wide range of AI-powered solutions, including natural language processing, speech recognition, and autonomous driving technologies.

Within this, Ernie is their large language model, which has gained significant attention for its capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text. And really what they are doing is building a flywheel in industry-specific intelligence. I’ve written about that here.

Here’s what it looks like:

Baidu

This is the least international of the companies on this list. But I think they are probably the most advanced in terms of GenAI expertise. I closely follow what CEO Robin Li says about the evolution of this technology. Here are the 4 pillars to Baidu’s AI Cloud strategy:

  • Pillar 1: Baidu AI Cloud Is an Innovation Platform Pushing to Reach Critical Mass
  • Pillar 2: Baidu AI Cloud Is Also Moving to Become a Technology Standard Deeper in the AI Tech Stack
  • Pillar 3: Baidu’s AI-Focused Cloud Has 2 Advantages Over Other Innovation Platforms
  • Pillar 4: Baidu’s AI Cloud Is a Flywheel in Industry-Specific Intelligence

Ok. Let’s get into some more fun stuff.

4. MiniMax / Hailuo AI: Video Generator

The two best video generators in the world today are Chinese. That’s really interesting.

One of them is Minimax, which goes by Hailuo AI. And it is truly fantastic at AI-driven video generation.

The company was founded in 2021 by several computer vision veterans from SenseTime (one of China’s first AI companies). The CEO is Yan JunJie and it’s based in Shanghai. That’s kind of interesting because Shanghai is not really a tech center for China. It’s more of a center for fashion and gaming. Note: Minimax received funding from MiHoYo, the developer of video game phenomenon Genshin Impact. They are also based in Shanghai.

You can try it here:

Which I strongly encourage. It’s amazing.

I’ve been using this to turn old family photos into short videos. I recently made videos of from photos of my grandfather, who died when my mother was a teenager. It was really amazing to see him in real life (sort of).

5. Kling AI (Kuaishou)

The other top AI video app is Kling AI, which was developed by Beijing-based Kuaishou.

It was released in June 2024, using a diffusion transformer text-to-video model. And everyone pretty much agreed it was the best. Definitely better than OpenAI’s Sora and others in the West. Kuaishou is similar to TikTok and they are tying this into their video editing / creation app.

Try it here. Note: the processing wait times are currently a bit long.

6. BYD

In the last year, BYD has finally become a globally well-known name. We’ve been writing about this company in China for 30 years. And Warren Buffett invested in it back in 2008. But it didn’t really become known until it started taking its EVs international in 2023.

BYD is led by Wang Chuanfu, who is probably the only EV technologist Elon Musk is afraid of. His track record of building BYD is really impressive. Charlie Munger called him the Thomas Edison of China.

And it was the vertical expansion from battery design and manufacturing to EVs that really made him famous. I’ve written about their EV business here.

BYD is short for “Build Your Dreams but the real name in Chinese is Bi Ya Di. They named themselves after Ya Di street (Ya Di Lu) in Shenzhen where they started. They later added the Bi so they wouldn’t be in the back of the hall at conventions (it’s alphabetical).

BYD (plus a few other Chinese EV companies) are currently crushing US and European automakers everywhere except their home countries. These governments are moving to protect their domestic automakers.

This month President Trump and others have argued that TikTok should not be allowed in the US because YouTube and Facebook are not allowed in China (the reciprocity argument). Keep in mind, that Tesla is allowed in China while BYD is blocked in the US.

Here is their WangYang U9 super car. Which can jump.

https://youtube.com/shorts/XYhwwKz7W0U?si=5yiNDXsixKpssuwJ

https://youtube.com/shorts/i_teZOBESfA?si=79gv6Xob9h311iM1

7. Unitree Robotics

This is another Chinese company that recently went viral. They posted videos of their Unitree Dog robot Go2.

See it here.

https://youtu.be/iI8UUu9g8iI?si=k4XIbrdOsyh_N4eK

https://youtu.be/CIkdq7Zf4Zw?si=OTgnjGLSUQlydz3o

Unitree Robotics, based in Hangzhou, was company was founded by Wang Xingxing in May 2016. He had worked at DJI prior. And their first robot was released in 2021.

There are a lot of Chinese robotics companies out there. So, I don’t really know how competitive this particular company will be internationally. But I expect robots to emerge from China the same way EVs have. A big application will be industrial robots and China is the factory of the world. When it comes to making robots, China has both the manufacturing scale and the biggest market (right now).

We already see Unitree’s robots being used by major manufacturers like Foxconn, where they assist in factory automation and operations.

8. Huawei

The last on the list is Huawei, which keeps shocking the US government.

Huawei is mostly back after getting hit with the entity list ban by the US government (starting in 2019). Their semiconductors are still not at US levels (which matters in smartphones), but they are way ahead in telecommunications equipment and most consumer electronics.

  • They have deployed 5G across China and Asia. They are now deploying 5.5G (which is 10x faster).
  • They make great consumer electronics. Their smartwatches, earbuds and other are fantastic.
  • Their operating system HarmonyOS is now a rival to Android and iOS.
  • They are making EVs now (see below).
  • Their smartphones (the trifold, earbuds, smart watches) are fantastic.
  • They are moving fast in semiconductors. Although they never tell anyone much about how they are doing this. And how much it costs.
  • They are somehow releasing top-tier smartphones, such as the trifold (see below).

And they are flooding money into R&D each year. Think +$20B annually. And they are moving aggressively in cloud, building data centers across Asia.

Now compare all of that to Apple, which added a new side button to the iPhone 16.

I’ve written a lot about them. I expect them to win big. Here’s what they are doing in GenAI.

Here are some fun videos of what they are doing.

Trifold: https://youtu.be/Yv_S7KrOlfk?si=hUUBnWZtoU-P-tjc

EV: https://youtu.be/mZEUXUdeNgU?si=IiY-iwLyISPzuBTC

***

Ok. That’s it for today. Just some fun stuff.

Jeff

———-

Related articles:

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

  • EV AV Auto
  • Robotics
  • GenAI

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

  • BYD
  • Unitree
  • Kuaishou / Kling AI
  • Huawei
  • Baidu AI Cloud
  • Alibaba Cloud
  • MiniMax / Hailuo AI
  • DeepSeek

Photo by Michael Förtsch on Unsplash

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I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.

I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.

My book series Moats and Marathons is one-of-a-kind framework for building and measuring competitive advantages in digital businesses.

This content (articles, podcasts, website info) is not investment, legal or tax advice. The information and opinions from me and any guests may be incorrect. The numbers and information may be wrong. The views expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. This is not investment advice. Investing is risky. Do your own research.

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