According to China Daily, Ren Zhengfei, founder of Huawei, Liang Wenfeng, founder of DeepSeek, and Wang Xingxing, founder of Unitree Technology, have recently been successfully selected in the 2025 list of the 100 Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence published by Time Magazine, highlighting China's growing influence in the global AI field.
These three Chinese entrepreneurs are categorized under the "Leaders" section in the AI field, alongside international tech giants such as Elon Musk, founder of xAI, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Huang Renxun, co-founder of NVIDIA, and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta.
The Chinese AI industry is showing strong growth momentum. According to the 56th "Statistical Report on the Development Status of China's Internet Network" released by the China Internet Network Information Center in July, the scale of China's AI industry exceeded 700 billion yuan in 2024, maintaining a growth rate of over 20% for many years.
In the first half of 2025, China's generative AI products achieved comprehensive breakthroughs from technology to application. As of March, a total of 346 generative AI services had completed registration with the Cyberspace Administration of China, with the number of products and application scenarios continuously expanding.
DeepSeek, an emerging AI unicorn, has stood out most notably. Its product attracted more than 30 million daily active users globally within 20 days of its launch, topped the app markets of 140 countries and regions worldwide, and became the fastest-growing generative AI application globally. The recently released DeepSeek-V3.1 version has made significant upgrades in three aspects: hybrid reasoning architecture, thinking efficiency, and agent capabilities.
Unitree Technology has maintained high popularity since the Spring Festival, demonstrating strong commercialization capabilities. Founder Wang Xingxing revealed at the Tianjin Summer Davos Forum in June that the company's annual revenue has exceeded 1 billion yuan, and it has been profitable for five consecutive years since 2020. According to data from Tianyancha, Unitree Technology has completed 10 rounds of financing, with a valuation exceeding 10 billion yuan. In its latest round, it received investments from major companies such as China Mobile, Tencent, Alibaba, and Ant Group. The company is currently at a critical moment for its IPO and has started the IPO tutoring process.
Huawei continues to consolidate its position as an AI giant under Ren Zhengfei's leadership. The related chips launched by the company have significantly enhanced China's position in global AI competition. Yu Chengdong, a Standing Director of Huawei, stated that in the first half of the year, the company continued to increase its investment in areas such as ICT infrastructure, intelligent vehicles, cloud computing, and embodied intelligence, strengthening its core competitiveness across multiple business sectors.
