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China Mobile has launched a Lunar New Year–timed promotional campaign featuring actor Wang Yaoqing to highlight network stability and user experience. The ad aims to reassure subscribers that China Mobile can handle seasonal traffic peaks and to translate large-scale network investment into everyday consumer benefits.

Chinese retailers and producers are charging significant premiums for eggs labelled as 'functional'—selenium‑enriched, DHA‑fortified, antibiotic‑free or suitable for raw consumption—by leveraging feed additives, tighter husbandry and marketing. Costs and risk management differ sharply across these claims, and tightening regulation is likely to compress ambiguous premiums, favouring integrated producers who can internalise the investments required.

Meituan has upgraded its AI concierge “问小团” for the Lunar New Year to offer verified, transaction‑ready local recommendations and holiday coupons, aiming to convert queries into on‑platform purchases. The move highlights a broader industry push to make generative AI the primary interface for commerce, raising questions about accuracy, merchant obligations and regulatory oversight.

Apptronik has closed a $520m A‑X round, bringing its Series A total to over $935m and nearly $1bn raised overall. The financing attracted strategic investors from tech, automotive, telecom and agriculture, underscoring renewed appetite for commercialising humanoid robots and signalling a new phase where big corporate money supports the transition from lab prototypes to industrial pilots.

Elon Musk told xAI staff that the company should build a factory on the Moon to manufacture AI satellites, arguing lunar production would provide unmatched compute and deployment advantages. The plan leverages SpaceX’s heavy‑lift ambitions but faces significant technical, economic and regulatory hurdles and could reshape strategic competition over AI infrastructure in space.

Apple has delayed and will stagger the rollout of major Siri AI features after internal tests exposed stability, accuracy and routing problems. Privacy constraints and underperforming in‑house models are slowing development, while some search and image features may still ship on schedule.

Seedance 2.0, a Chinese generative video model, can produce hyper-realistic footage by integrating image, motion, audio and text, lowering the barriers to making sophisticated video. Its realism has sparked copyright backlash and deepfake concerns even as China’s large user base, open-source releases and supportive AI policy accelerate development and adoption.

Mianbi Intelligence has released SALA, a hybrid sparse‑linear attention architecture, and a 9B model called MiniCPM‑SALA that claims large inference speed gains and support for up to one million token contexts. If independently validated, the design could make very long‑context applications feasible on mid‑sized models and a range of inference hardware.

Lantu has secured all pre‑listing regulatory approvals and conditional HKEX consent to list in Hong Kong by way of introduction, following a CSRC filing valid from January 22. The listing is embedded in a two‑stage corporate restructure that will distribute Lantu shares to Dongfeng shareholders and privatize Dongfeng Group, positioning Lantu as a likely first centrally owned EV firm to list overseas.

Meta will build a 1 GW data‑centre campus in Lebanon, Indiana, with more than $10 billion invested in the facility and nearby community, creating roughly 4,000 construction jobs and 300 permanent roles. The scale of the project signals a strategic push for large‑scale AI and content infrastructure but raises questions about power supply, local benefits and long‑term demand for such massive compute sites.

Xi Jinping has instructed China’s National Natural Science Foundation Commission to strengthen and strategically reorient funding for basic research, deepen grant reforms, and support original scientific breakthroughs to advance technological self‑reliance. The move elevates basic science as a national priority while foreshadowing more targeted funding, tougher incentives for originality and cautious expansion of international cooperation.

China’s Ministry of Commerce has ordered robust implementation of trade‑in subsidies for appliances, electronics and automobiles during the nine‑day 2026 Spring Festival holiday, prioritising offline channels and rural participation. The policy is a targeted consumption stimulus designed to boost holiday spending, support physical retailers and protect subsidy integrity through upgraded information systems and anti‑fraud measures.

Guotou Securities has received its fourth regulatory warning within ten months after Chinese provincial regulators found repeated compliance failings across branches in Zaozhuang, Xiamen and Shenzhen. The sanctions — recorded in the national integrity database — reflect a sustained crackdown on improper marketing, unqualified fund sales and other breaches in retail distribution practices.

Since January, Chinese regulators have issued at least 11 penalties against regional branches of the Bank of Communications for widespread compliance and lending violations. The fines, though modest relative to the bank’s size, expose systemic weaknesses in governance and signal tightened regulatory scrutiny across provinces.

China’s stock market saw a broad mid‑session rally led by power‑grid equipment and other industrial names, while cinema chains tumbled. High turnover and more than 2,700 advancing stocks signalled a retail‑led rotation into infrastructure and materials ahead of the holiday period.

China’s dairy market experienced broad declines in 2025 as liquid‑milk consumption and core categories cooled, pressuring corporate profits and prompting market leaders to spend heavily on infant‑formula subsidies to lock in future users. The sector is pivoting toward higher‑margin functional and lifecycle nutrition products, but faces high R&D costs, channel friction and the risk of rapid homogeneity.

Airbus has secured INTA certification for fully automated boom refuelling on the A330 MRTT, covering daytime and night operations. The milestone automates a historically manual, high-risk task, provides a procurement advantage against rivals such as Boeing, and paves the way for refuelling of unmanned aircraft — with attendant security and industrial-policy implications.

Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief security adviser, said indirect talks with the United States continue and signalled that American engagement indicates a move toward pragmatism, while warning that Israel is trying to undermine the negotiations. Meeting Qatar’s leaders, Larijani said Iran has not received concrete US proposals and reiterated that an attack on Iran would bring retaliatory strikes on US bases in the region.

South Korea showcased concepts for large unmanned aircraft carriers — notably a 42,000‑tonne design — and plans to retrofit its Dokdo and Marado amphibious ships for UAV operations. The move signals a strategic shift toward unmanned naval aviation that could expand Seoul’s expeditionary reach and create new industrial opportunities, even as technical, budgetary and geopolitical challenges persist.

NATO will reassign two major regional command posts—Naples to Italy and Norfolk to the United Kingdom—as part of a planned redistribution of senior officer duties within the alliance. The changes reflect U.S. efforts to rebalance responsibilities as Washington pivots priorities globally while keeping top operational commands and the Supreme Allied Commander Europe under U.S. control.