Tech Brief (April 17): China’s Daily AI Token Calls Top 140 Trillion

Published: Apr. 17, 2026 6:58 p.m. GMT+8

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China’s daily AI token calls top 140 trillion

China has made breakthroughs in the commercial and scaled application of artificial intelligence, with daily token calls exceeding 140 trillion by March, up more than 40% from the end of last year, Mao Shengyong, deputy head of the National Bureau of Statistics, said at a press conference on Thursday.

Alibaba releases world model Happy Oyster

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China’s daily AI token calls exceed 140 trillion by March, up >40% from year-end.
Alibaba releases Happy Oyster multimodal world model; Tencent open-sources 3D world model 2.0.
TARS raises $455M record pre-A funding; SenseTime plans ~HK$3.2B share placement.

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Who’s Who

Alibaba: Alibaba released Happy Oyster, a world model supporting multimodal understanding and joint audio-video generation. It was developed by Alibaba’s ATH innovation business group, the team behind HappyHorse.

Tencent: Tencent’s Hunyuan team released and open-sourced its 3D world model 2.0, a multimodal AI model that generates, reconstructs, and simulates 3D worlds from text, image, and video inputs.

TARS: Chinese humanoid robotics startup TARS raised $455 million in a pre-A funding round, marking the largest single-round financing in China's humanoid robotics sector. This funding underscores the intense competition among Chinese firms for commercial viability and IPO preparation amid global AI-physical task challenges.

SenseTime Group Inc.: SenseTime Group Inc. announced a placing agreement to issue 1.7 billion shares at HK$1.91 (24 US cents) each, expecting gross and net proceeds of approximately HK$3.2 billion.

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