AI Weekly: iPhone China AI to Open Testing Next Week; DeepSeek's 100-Billion-Yuan Financing Details Revealed

Apple officially announces AI for iPhone in China, testing opens November 4

On October 31, Apple announced that the first batch of Apple Intelligence features will open for testing in China on November 4 with the iOS developer beta, and will be officially released in December with iOS 27.3. Apple has partnered with Alibaba to integrate Qwen into parts of the Siri, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence experiences, supporting text and image understanding. The first batch of features includes Live Translation in Messages, FaceTime, and Phone; rewriting, proofreading, and summarizing in Writing Tools; Clean Up in Photos, natural language search, and Memory movie creation; as well as Genmoji, notification summaries, and Priority Mail. Supported devices include iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 16 and later models, iPhone Duo, and iPhone Air.

[Commentary] The first batch of Apple Intelligence features to launch still faces strict hardware and compliance restrictions. The service is currently limited to specific iPhone models that meet the running memory requirements, and iPad and Mac devices are not yet included in the first batch of supported devices. At the same time, constrained by the progress of regulatory approval, the new-generation Apple Intelligence and advanced features such as Siri AI released by Apple at WWDC 2026 this year will not be provided to the mainland China market for the time being.

Details of DeepSeek's 100-billion-yuan financing revealed, with nearly 30 institutions participating

Specific details of DeepSeek's second round of financing have surfaced. On October 30, according to media outlet Xiaoxi, DeepSeek completed a second round of financing of about 105.5 billion yuan this month from nearly 30 investors, with a post-investment valuation of 615.5 billion yuan. The report said Tencent and CATL remain DeepSeek's two largest investors. New investors in this round include ChangXin Memory Technologies and its chairman Zhu Yiming, as well as SMIC. vivo, Meituan, Midea, Luxshare Precision, Geely, Trip.com, and Xiaohongshu also participated, with individual contributions ranging from 1 billion to 3 billion yuan. State-owned telecom operators China Mobile and China Telecom, investment banks CICC and CITIC Securities, and insurer China Life contributed between 2 billion and 8 billion yuan each. The National Artificial Intelligence Industry Development Fund invested another 1 billion yuan, the same as in the first round, and invested directly in DeepSeek.

[Commentary] In June 2026, DeepSeek completed its first round of financing, raising about 50 billion yuan. This financing means DeepSeek has cumulatively raised more than 150 billion yuan over several months. According to a late-September media report, Liang Wenfeng disclosed at a recent investor meeting that the company's annualized revenue run rate had reached $1 billion, more than doubling from $400 million to $500 million several months earlier.

Anthropic sprints toward a trillion-dollar IPO

On October 26 local time, U.S. AI large-model company Anthropic submitted documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), planning to list on Nasdaq under the ticker "ANT," with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the underwriting. The issue price, number of shares to be issued, and fundraising size have not been determined, but market expectations for its valuation have already surged to $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. If completed at the upper limit, this would become one of the largest IPOs in history. In terms of performance, Anthropic's full-year revenue was $41 million in 2023, $386 million in 2024, and $4.585 billion in 2025. In the first half of 2026, it jumped directly to $16.286 billion, about 14 times the same period a year earlier; in the second quarter of this year, Anthropic achieved operating profit of $974 million, with an operating margin of about 8%; after excluding items such as stock-based compensation and non-cash charitable donations, adjusted operating profit was $2.235 billion, with a margin of about 19%. By comparison, OpenAI's adjusted operating margin in the same period was about -122%.

[Commentary] From Wall Street to Silicon Valley and across the entire AI industry, the market is closely watching this IPO. What really needs to be priced is not whether AI can make money, but whether growth can continue to outrun costs when a ten-year bill is signed in advance. "If Anthropic performs poorly after listing, investors will have to reprice AI companies," said Brad Bernstein, managing partner of FTV Capital, an institution focused on investing in growth stocks.

DeepSeek releases a new Agent architecture

On the evening of October 31, the DeepSeek Harness team published a technical article on its official WeChat account titled "Super-agent Design Exploration: Toward a More Autonomous Agent System," detailing its Super-agent architecture for Agent engineering practice. DeepSeek said that improvements in model capabilities have given rise to new application forms, and Personal Agents have begun to emerge in concentrated numbers. However, existing mainstream Agent designs are still unable to support this model at the scale of multitasking and team collaboration, and the upper limit of multitasking depends on human attention. Through ideas such as a two-layer architecture, event-driven design, asynchronous multi-channel interaction, separation of storage and computation, and an external Watchdog, the DeepSeek team broke through these limitations. The system takes over tedious session management and context synchronization at the underlying level, allowing humans to move further up from specific execution details to higher-level decision-making and acceptance.

[Comment] At the end of the article, the DeepSeek team candidly stated that they did not propose an entirely new theory, but rather applied classic computer systems ideas to the Agent architecture. This process is already running internally, participating daily in problem reproduction and fixes, code review responses, and so on. For example, when team members report software issues in a group chat, even if no one actively @s the AI, it can identify potential defects and attempt in the background to reproduce the problem and find a fix.

Financial reports from five tech giants released, three with negative free cash flow

As of now, five of the "Magnificent Seven" U.S. stocks have released their latest quarterly earnings, and three of them had negative free cash flow for the quarter: Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, and Meta posted net outflows of approximately $33.5 billion, $9.1 billion, and $2.1 billion, respectively. Microsoft and Tesla, by contrast, achieved positive free cash flow of approximately $18.6 billion and $1.5 billion, respectively. After the earnings releases, Microsoft received positive market reviews on the back of better-than-expected cloud business growth and cash flow performance; Google parent Alphabet fell 12.6%, its largest single-day drop since going public; Amazon's after-hours stock price fell by nearly 7% at one point after its earnings release; and Meta and Tesla shares also declined after their earnings reports.

[Comment] Although there are differences in the statistical calibers for capex and free cash flow across companies, this divergence reflects that AI infrastructure investment is placing significant pressure on the cash flow of some tech giants. "In the past, the market was willing to pay for AI's growth prospects and technology story, but the latest round of earnings from tech giants means that AI investment is moving from an 'arms race' of competing on capex scale into a stage of testing commercialization returns," Zhang Yi, CEO of iiMedia Research, told Yicai.

ChangXin Technology's third-quarter net profit growth slows quarter-on-quarter

On October 30, ChangXin Technology released its third-quarter earnings. In the quarter, ChangXin Technology's revenue was 118.714 billion yuan, up 613.18% year-on-year, and net profit was 54.435 billion yuan, turning profitable year-on-year. In the first three quarters, ChangXin Technology's revenue was 269.024 billion yuan, up 738.51% year-on-year, and net profit was 132.04 billion yuan. In the second quarter, ChangXin Technology's revenue and net profit grew 95.9% and 113.4% quarter-on-quarter, while in the third quarter the quarter-on-quarter increases were 19.3% and 3.01%, respectively, showing a slowdown in quarter-on-quarter growth.

[Comment] The performance of memory chip manufacturers reflects to some extent the real progress of the AI infrastructure construction wave. The particularly notable shrinkage in ChangXin Technology's third-quarter net profit quarter-on-quarter growth may also indicate that the pace of memory product price increases has slowed somewhat. ChangXin Technology's recent stock price trend reflects investors' attitude. From September 30 to October 30, ChangXin Technology's stock price fell 24.75% cumulatively, with market value evaporating by more than 880 billion yuan in one month.

SK Hynix's quarterly revenue exceeds 100 trillion won for the first time

On October 28, SK Hynix released its third-quarter 2026 earnings. Quarterly revenue was 104.6155 trillion won (about 522 billion yuan), up 328% year-on-year and 32% quarter-on-quarter; operating profit was 83.3338 trillion won (about 415.8 billion yuan), up 632% year-on-year and 38% quarter-on-quarter; net profit was 39.7756 trillion won (about 198.4 billion yuan), up 216% year-on-year and down 58% quarter-on-quarter.

[Comment] Driven by AI demand, SK Hynix's revenue and operating profit in the quarter both set the company's highest quarterly records in history, with quarterly revenue exceeding 100 trillion won for the first time, and both revenue and operating profit exceeded prior market expectations. Regarding the memory supply-demand relationship, SK Hynix also expects the supply shortage to persist until 2030. The company is also continuing to build production capacity and plans to increase investment in infrastructure next year.

Samsung Electronics shares fall after latest earnings release

On October 29, Samsung Electronics delivered a third-quarter report card that was "the most profitable in history yet still below expectations": quarterly sales were 195.25 trillion won and operating profit was 107.44 trillion won, with operating profit surging 783% year-on-year and setting a record for the fourth consecutive quarter, but net profit was only 75.21 trillion won, far below the market estimate of 89.06 trillion won. After the earnings release, Samsung Electronics fell 4.13% that day.

[Comment] Memory chips are Samsung Electronics' largest source of profit. However, after the earlier sharp rise in memory prices, narrowing price increases for some products have put pressure on memory manufacturers' performance growth. Samsung Electronics' earnings report weighed on the stock performance of other names in the memory sector. On October 29, SK Hynix turned negative at one point during intraday trading, and on October 30 both Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix shares fell.

Optical module "Yi Zhong Tian" revenue exceeds 100 billion yuan in first three quarters

On October 29, the third-quarter earnings of the optical module concept stocks "Yi Zhong Tian" were all released. In the third quarter, Zhongji Innolight's revenue was 27.769 billion yuan, up 171.83% year-on-year, and net profit was 8.587 billion yuan, up 173.74% year-on-year; Eoptolink's revenue was 10.94 billion yuan, up 80.30% year-on-year, and net profit was 3.843 billion yuan, up 61.15% year-on-year; T&S Communications' revenue was 1.923 billion yuan, up 31.5% year-on-year, and net profit was 879 million yuan, up 55.3% year-on-year. In the third quarter, the three companies' total net profit reached 13.3 billion yuan, and their total revenue and net profit in the first three quarters reached 106.1 billion yuan and 35.6 billion yuan.

[Comment] Optical module manufacturers' performance is tied to the progress of global AI data center construction. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, the three companies' third-quarter performance was uneven. T&S Communications and Zhongji Innolight saw their third-quarter revenue growth accelerate quarter-on-quarter, but their net profit growth slowed quarter-on-quarter. Eoptolink, meanwhile, saw both revenue and net profit shift from quarter-on-quarter growth to quarter-on-quarter decline, falling 13% and 19% respectively in the third quarter. Even though the three companies' latest quarterly results were still growing year-on-year, the capital market was not buying it. On October 30, all three companies' share prices fell.

Tencent has deployed more than 2 million servers globally

At Tencent's Global Digital Ecosystem Summit on October 29, Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent, said that Tencent Cloud is accelerating the construction of global data centers and has deployed more than 2 million servers, with overseas AI demand for Tencent Cloud growing by triple digits over the past year. In addition, Tencent Cloud previously worked with the Hunyuan team to increase the throughput of domestic chips per card by 5 times in the two weeks before launch, and the Hy4 model will be launched soon.

[Comment] Over the past year, Tencent has added or expanded data centers in Frankfurt, Germany; Malaysia; Mexico; Osaka, Japan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and Thailand, and Tencent Cloud also plans to expand its footprint in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas over the next year. For purposes such as computing power infrastructure construction, Tencent's capital expenditure in the second quarter of this year was 52.784 billion yuan, up 176% year-on-year.