Flash News

TREE NEWS update: Zhipu told analysts and investors on a September 16 call that it has signed revenue-sharing agreements with several leading cloud service providers at home and abroad, with related revenue to be recognized from October. Under the model, its GLM open-source models are offered as managed APIs on overseas cloud platforms. Zhipu said its all-business ARR has reached $1.8 billion and raised its year-end ARR guidance to $3 billion from $2.4 billion.

TREE NEWS update: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the risks posed by artificial intelligence have become more clearly defined, and that the EU will strengthen AI cooperation with Canada and the United Kingdom. She also said the Commission will invite frontier AI laboratories to a dialogue on the pace of development.

TREE NEWS reports: Zhang Yiming, the 43-year-old founder of ByteDance, has become Asia’s richest person for the first time, with a net worth surpassing $105 billion. His fortune now exceeds that of India’s Gautam Adani, and has grown roughly sevenfold from the $13 billion recorded when Bloomberg first tracked him in March 2019, as AI-related wealth surged past billionaires in traditional industries.

TREE NEWS update: ByteDance’s Doubao Work has been deeply integrated with Feishu Aily and will in future be billed entirely by actual token consumption, with the new product expected to sell at a significantly lower price. Doubao Work currently only supports ByteDance’s in-house Doubao-series models, and the company is developing smaller, higher-performance models to cut costs for enterprise clients. It will later allow enterprises to plug in their own procured large-model APIs and settle directly with model vendors.

TREE NEWS update: Baidu Smart Cloud announced at the 2026 Smart Economy Forum on September 16 that its Dazi platform is becoming a fully open ecosystem, with partner recruitment now open and onboarding available to capability providers across four categories: connectors, skills, kits and hardware. Baidu pledged it will never take a commission from partners.

TREE NEWS reports: China’s internet data services sector consumed more than 60 billion kWh of electricity this year, up over 40% year on year, the China Electricity Council said. The council described internet data and battery-swap and charging services as representative of a new type of digital-energy load that has seen explosive growth.

TREE NEWS update: Zhipu said on a September 16 call with analysts and investors that it has completed a $5 billion refinancing through a “small equity, large debt” structure, driven by the need to expand compute capacity. After the February release of GLM-5, model API call demand surged tenfold, exhausting the company’s compute reserves almost within the launch week and forcing it to halt sales of its flagship Coding plan.

TREE NEWS update: Bilibili launched an “AI Infinite Arena” evaluation platform that has catalogued more than 30 testing topics and over 100 competing large language models, with related content drawing over 13.98 million views. Ranked by the number of times each model topped a topic, GPT-6 Astra, GLM-5.3 and Claude Fable 5.1 currently hold the top three spots.

TREE NEWS update: The Nubia NaviX Ultra, the first phone carrying ByteDance’s Doubao AI phone assistant, went on sale on September 16 under a 30-day public disclosure rule tied to the new Screen Automation Operation Declaration Protocol (SAEP). Voice commands currently cover ByteDance’s full product lineup plus a few third-party apps such as Caocao Mobility; external e-commerce apps including Taobao Flash Purchase and JD.com are not yet supported, and a coffee-ordering request was routed to Douyin.

TREE NEWS reports: Phemex CEO Federico Variola said AI has been a “net negative” for crypto, arguing it has diverted capital away from the industry and is empowering attackers. He added that rising cybersecurity costs could push the crypto industry toward greater centralization.

TREE NEWS update: Zhipu (02513.HK) told analysts and investors on a call that it has completed a $5 billion refinancing structured as ‘small equity, large debt,’ to fund computing capacity expansion. Demand for its model calls surged tenfold after the February GLM-5 launch, exhausting its compute reserves within the week of release and forcing it to suspend sales of its flagship Coding plan. The company raised $4 billion in July and a further $5 billion on September 11.

TREE NEWS reports: Micro LED display application modules and Micro LED CPO modules are projected to generate a combined total output value of $5.308 billion by 2030. The research firm said 2026 industry resources are shifting toward applications with clear commercialization potential, as weak consumer demand and AI capital expenditure crowd out investment. Beyond displays, Micro LED is expanding into CPO optical interconnect to capture a role in AI infrastructure.

TREE NEWS update: Cloudflare has made its “block AI training” setting available to all customers, letting sites refuse use of their content for AI model training while keeping search indexing intact. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI were certified as “responsible” crawler operators, required to offer training and AI-summary opt-outs and disclose URL-level indexing. Cloudflare said about 17% of sites already block some form of training, while fewer than 1% block search crawlers.

TREE NEWS update: AI pharmaceutical company Anew Labs has closed a first independent funding round totaling $290 million, announced September 16. Investors include Sequoia China, IDG Capital, Hillhouse Venture Capital, 5Y Capital and Gaorong Capital, alongside several Chinese pharmaceutical industry groups participating as strategic investors.

TREE NEWS update: Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee on September 16 unveiled the city’s first five-year plan for 2026-2030, which includes building an AI-powered ‘city brain’ urban management system. The platform will combine artificial intelligence, big data and IoT to enable real-time cross-departmental data sharing, risk alerts and predictive analysis for city operations and security governance.

TREE NEWS reports: SoftBank Group’s five-year credit default swaps traded near a three-year high at about 383.2 basis points, as traders assessed the potential impact of its financing plans for OpenAI, its largest bets. SoftBank has committed $64.6 billion to OpenAI, which is in early talks with investors for a new funding round ahead of an IPO at a valuation above $1.2 trillion. CEO Sam Altman said the long-awaited IPO remains in preparation but will not happen this year.

TREE NEWS update: China Mobile announced on September 16 that it is open-sourcing Open-RAIL to the global developer community. The company describes it as the industry’s first general-purpose engineering foundation connecting VLA and WAM models with robotic bodies. The release opens the middleware layer that links AI models to robot hardware.

TREE NEWS reports: Shares of Zhipu AI rose more than 10% in Hong Kong afternoon trading. The AI company’s stock extended gains in the afternoon session, climbing past the 10% mark.

TREE NEWS update: DeepSeek machine learning engineer Liu Shengyu published a viral essay on September 14 after delivering the main attention operator for DeepSeek V4.1. Liu, a Peking University Turing Class member who joined DeepSeek in April 2025, wrote that AI will match or surpass his hand-written operator work within six months to a year, forcing him to retrain as an AI agent operator rather than face unemployment. The essay topped Zhihu’s trending list.

TREE NEWS update: Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee on Wednesday unveiled the city’s first five-year plan for economic and social development (2026-2030) alongside his 2026 Policy Address, pledging citywide AI training for residents. The plan includes more than 200 training courses and activities. Lee announced the measures in the Policy Address delivered the same day.