Lisbon (AFP) – Robot dances, flying cars or low-cost artificial intelligence models: China is showing its muscles at the Web Summit, which brings together tech players from Tuesday in Lisbon, at a time when it is accused of spying on the American giant Nvidia.
Published on: 10/11/2026 - 01:08
“Increasingly, the superstars of the future do not come from California, but from China,” Paddy Cosgrave, the founder of this new technology event, said on stage on Monday during the opening night.
At least 70,000 participants from 164 countries, including 10,000 start-ups and 1,500 investors, are expected there until Thursday.
Among them are more than 50 Chinese speakers from "the best artificial intelligence (AI) laboratories, robotics start-ups, automobile manufacturers, quantum and energy start-ups", added Mr. Cosgrave.
Tao Zhang, co-founder of Manus AI, a Chinese gem that Meta tried to buy without success, will show on Tuesday how his Manus 2.0 agent works, a computer program capable of chaining together a series of tasks on its own.
The Web Summit will also welcome Li Chen, co-founder of Unitree, Chinese robotics champion, William Shi, European president of Agibot, its competitor, and demonstrations of humanoid robots from Chinese companies Galbot and Ubtech Robotics.
The humanoids of Agibot also performed dance steps on stage on Monday and showed their knowledge of tai chi.
Leo Haojun Wang, co-founder of Pony.ai, a Chinese company which provides the AI brain for thousands of robot taxis deployed in China and recently in Europe, will also be present, as will Deli Zhao, co-founder of Xpeng, which wants to produce flying cars on a large scale. A prototype was also exhibited on stage on Monday.
Nvidia in people's minds
Faced with sluggish domestic consumption and kept away from certain parts of the American market for reasons of national security, Chinese tech "does not have 36 solutions. The market to export to is Europe", Thomas Husson, an independent analyst, explained to AFP.
Chinese AI models with open weights, that is to say, downloadable for free and partially modifiable as opposed to state-of-the-art closed American models such as those from Anthropic and OpenAI, are increasingly attractive to European companies such as Orange, Renault, Revolut and Siemens.
“Honestly, cost is a determining factor,” Fred Sun, Europe director of Tencent Cloud, told AFP on Monday.
But China is also on everyone's minds at the Web Summit because of the scandal affecting the American chip giant Nvidia.
His boss, Jensen Huang, one of the most powerful players in the sector, admitted an affair with a Chinese executive whom American intelligence suspects of working for Beijing, which denies.
However, Nvidia controls around 90% of the market for chips used to train and operate AI models, and the shaking of such a juggernaut is enough to make the entire tech ecosystem shudder.
Proof of this nervousness: the group's share price lost more than 4% on Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, even dropping up to 8% during the day.
© 2026 AFP
The content you are trying to access does not exist or is no longer available.
