China’s Tech Front: Chip Startups Rivaling NVIDIA, Robotics Buzz, and Next-Gen AI Trends

August 22, 2025 — In this episode of the China’s DeepSeek Moment webinar series by the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis (CCA), CCA Fellow Lizzi C. Lee is joined by Rui Ma, Chief Operating Officer at AlphaWatch.AI; Paul Triolo, CCA Honorary Senior Fellow on Technology; and Selina Xu, China and AI Policy Lead at the Office of Eric Schmidt, to unpack on-the-ground takeaways from China’s fast-evolving tech landscape, including the 2025 Shanghai AI Conference and an upcoming robotics expo, and what they mean for U.S.-China tech competition.

The panel gauges remaining bottlenecks across graphics processing units, robotics, and brain-computer interfaces and assesses the pace of AI adoption and applications, including emerging trends, such as agents and multimodality. The discussion also takes the temperature of investment sentiment amid uneven macro signals before closing with predictions on where China’s next “DeepSeek-style” breakthrough is most likely to emerge. (53min., 52 sec.)