3 Before 9: April 18, 2026

TSMC lifted its full-year revenue forecast on Thursday and pledged more capital spending, after first-quarter profit jumped 58 percent to a record T$572.5 billion (US$18.2 billion), its eighth straight quarter of double-digit growth. The world's largest contract chipmaker, which supplies Nvidia, said advanced 3-nanometre chips now account for a quarter of sales, up from 6 percent in late 2023. CEO C.C. Wei told analysts "AI-related demand continues to be extremely robust" and warned that production capacity remains tight.

Stanford's HAI 2026 AI Index, released this week, found that the top Chinese model, ByteDance's Dola-Seed 2.0, now trails Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 by just 39 Elo points, a 2.7 percent gap in Arena scores. Back in May 2023, OpenAI's GPT-4 led Chinese models by more than 300 points. The report also notes China now accounts for 20.6 percent of global AI citations versus 12.6 percent for the US, and leads on patents, publications and robot deployment. The US still holds an edge in sheer number of frontier models, with 50 to China's 30.

Manycore Tech, one of Hangzhou's celebrated six "Little Dragons" alongside DeepSeek and Unitree, closed its first trading day on the Hong Kong exchange at HK$18.60, 144 percent above the HK$7.62 offer price, after raising up to HK$1.02 billion. The company pitches "spatial intelligence" as the next wave of AI, building 3D design and scene-understanding models aimed at property, retail and manufacturing use cases. It is the first of the six Hangzhou startups to reach public markets.