Overseas investors are effectively investing early in Chinese AI semiconductor companies through perpetual futures on cryptocurrency exchanges, an analysis said. With direct access to mainland Chinese equities limited, investors are betting on pre-listing prices via crypto derivatives. Trading has surged ahead of ChangXin Memory Technologies\' planned STAR Market listing. The products allow round-the-clock trading without owning shares and are seen as a way to bypass China’s foreign investment restrictions and perform price discovery before IPO pricing.

Alibaba Group Holding\'s mapping unit Amap has unveiled an upgraded version of ABot, an AI framework that integrates robot mobility, manipulation, reasoning and control into a single system. Amap described ABot as linking a robot\'s feet, hands, brain and nervous system. It said ABot combines five foundation models, including ABot-N1 for autonomous navigation and ABot-M0.5 for combined movement and manipulation. Amap claimed top-tier results on 17 benchmarks without providing details.