Shanghai will host its eighth annual flagship artificial intelligence (AI) conference this weekend as China ramps up competition against the US for supremacy in the fast-developing technology.
The three-day World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), with the theme of “Global Solidarity in the AI Era”, will kick off on Saturday with an opening keynote from Premier Li Qiang, who also headlined last year’s event. A high-level meeting on global AI governance will be held in tandem with the conference.
The main forum, taking place at the Shanghai World Expo Centre, will feature a line-up of renowned international scientists and business leaders. Nobel laureate and “AI godfather” Geoffrey Hinton, Harry Shum, council chairman at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Turing Award winner Andrew Yao are among the participants.
Prominent business leaders who will speak include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, MiniMax founder Yan Junjie and SenseTime CEO Xu Li, along with senior executives from Siemens and Schneider Electric.
The conference represents an opportunity for China to showcase to the global AI community its latest advancements amid a heated race between the world’s two largest economies.
On Wednesday, the White House released a 28-page AI Action Plan designed to further strengthen exports of American AI technology to China and limit the spread of Chinese AI models, as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping plan to shape the rules governing the fast-moving technology.
In a speech, US President Donald Trump laid out the stakes of the tech arms race with China, saying it would be “a policy of the United States to do whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence”.
The conference will concurrently host over 100 sub-forums and related events on topics ranging from AI applications in science and industry to safety, agents and humanoid robotics. The expo, which is expected to draw more than 800 exhibitors, will showcase more than 3,000 AI-related products, including 40 large language models, 50 AI-powered devices and 60 advanced robots, according to the organiser.
Major Chinese tech companies – including Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings and SenseTime – will host sub-forums where they are expected to provide updates on their proprietary AI models, as well as lead discussions on the latest trends in AI.
Alibaba, the Hangzhou-based e-commerce giant which is doubling down on its AI investment, will host a forum on Sunday featuring electric vehicle maker Zeekr and US business management platform Salesforce, to discuss how to promote the large-scale application of AI agents. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
SenseTime – founded by scientists including the late AI visionary Tang Xiao’ou, a former professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong – is expected to launch a new generation of its SenseNova AI model series, while announcing a new partnership with Huawei Technologies’ AI semiconductor brand Ascend. Huawei’s CloudMatrix384, an Ascend chip-based “supernode” computing architecture, will be on display at WAIC.
Humanoid robots, heavily backed by local governments and private sector investments this year, will be another spotlight of the exhibition, with dozens of related companies participating.
Although US companies represent a very small proportion of exhibitors, they will be some of the biggest names there. These include electric vehicle maker Tesla, as well as cloud computing giants Amazon Web Services and Google, according to the exhibitor list.
Some important AI players, however, are missing from the guest list. They include DeepSeek – the Chinese start-up whose low-cost, high-performance reasoning models shocked the global tech community at the start of this year – and Nvidia, the US chip giant whose graphics processing units (GPUs) are powering the development of major AI models.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang visited China earlier this month, where he met commerce officials and tech leaders, and praised AI developments in China. Nvidia also announced the resumption of H20 GPU sales to China after a previous ban in April.
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