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China packs Shanghai with 1,100 AI and robotics firms
Photos from Shanghai’s World AI Conference show China’s latest robots, chips, and AI systems as tech rivalry with the U.S. intensifies.
Image: TechXplore
More than 1,100 companies took part in the World AI Conference in Shanghai, where China’s top tech firms showed off a broad range of new products spanning robotics, AI systems, chips, smart glasses, and brain-computer interfaces. The annual event ran from July 17 to 20, 2026, against the backdrop of an increasingly heated U.S.-China tech rivalry.
According to state media, Chinese companies have developed more than 400 humanoid robot products—more than half the world’s total. The exhibition floor reflected that scale, with displays from companies including Huawei, Pudu Robotics, Unitree Robotics, Efort, Magiclab, Huayan Robotics, DaxRobotics, Xynova, Yunmu Intelligence Manufacturing, Eastern Computing Chips, and Mindtrix.
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The photo set highlights both spectacle and industrial ambition: opera-costumed robots walking the booths, humanoids boxing, robotic hands with realistic skin, industrial robots lined up for demos, and a brain-computer interface display. It also underscores a broader shift cited in the source article: open-source AI models from China are increasingly challenging leading American models as they gain wider global adoption.
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Ava covers the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, from foundational models and research labs to the real-world economics of intelligence. With a background in computational linguistics, she cuts through the hype to find out what actually works. She firmly believes that benchmarks are just marketing until reproduced in the wild.
via TechXplore
