By Evelyn Cheng
Looking back, Honor is not the only major Chinese company to have made strides over the last two years. Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi has launched two electric cars to directly compete with Tesla. DeepSeek was officially registered as a company in July 2023, according to records, before launching its breakthrough AI model in January this year.
AI’s pervasiveness has also started to penetrate the “less flashy” parts of China’s economy.
In July 2023, Huawei launched a dedicated AI model for commercial mining with mining company Yunding Technology and state-owned Shandong Energy Group. The model, based on its foundational “Pangu” model, allowed workers to operate mine equipment remotely from an office and develop other tech solutions more quickly.
Fast-forward to 2025, and the AI tech has been integrated in more than 100 mines, according to Huawei’s annual report released in March. In May, the company’s client in Inner Mongolia launched 100 self-driving electric trucks for a local coal mine.
Huawei last month revealed a new, 5.5 version of its Pangu foundation model, and on Monday, released an open source version for developers.
Foreign companies are also spurring technological innovation on the mainland, such as German industrial giant Siemens.
Out of 18 AI-integration related products Siemens just launched, 16 were developed in China in just nine months, Peter Koerte, the company’s chief technology officer and chief strategy officer, said last week during the World Economic Forum conference in Tianjin. He described applications such as AI-powered energy savings systems for buildings.
These technological breakthroughs are the result of years or months of painstaking development, but it’s only more recently that businesses are reaping the rewards.
“AI is transforming from isolated technological innovation into something that is core or embedded in the whole business process,” Janet Tang, Hong Kong-based partner and managing director at AlixPartners, told me last week on the sidelines of the conference in Tianjin.
She stated that the significant integration of AI with business operations began roughly 12 months ago, following extensive trial and error over the past few years.