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tphuang Profile picture
tphuang
@tphuang
My random thoughts on EVs, clean energy, chips, aerospace and other tech. Find more extended pieces at substack https://t.co/Jmo8iyjHrn
4 subscribers
Feb 18 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
Having received electricity generation data from both CEC & NEA for 2025, I used Kimi 2.5 to analyze trend since 2015.

Coal portion has decreased to 51% whereas non-thermal increased to 43% as of 2024. The change has accelerated in past 2 yrs due to solar/wind expansion. Image Structure of thermal power generation looks like the following. 82.5% of generators are coal, followed by NG, biomass & others (like waste-to-energy plant)

Other thermal generates ~6% of power.
NG capacity has grown the fastest here, but biomass also growing faster than coal. Image
Feb 17 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
China's economy will change bigly over the next 20 yrs due to shift in its labor force. Here is Kimi generated labor force projection by 2030 showing work age population drop by 41m over next 5 yrs.

Not only that, 70% of ppl entering work force want to do white collar jobs. So economy needs to create more white collar jobs while dramatically reduce blue collar jobs.Image
Image In 2025, China's service sector export had 14.2% growth while import had just 2.5% growth.

Trade deficit shrunk to just 828B RMB. Knowledge Intensive service (like s/w stuff) export grew by 37.8% YoY & surplus here reached 576B RMB. It is 38% of China's overall service export. Image
Feb 15 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Too often, online AI “experts” make generalizations about Chinese AI labs when they each have their own niche. Kimi is not like GLM or Minimax. It is in fact going for large models that excel in deep research & agentic use.

But don’t expect Kimi to excel in multi modal stuff. Kimi 2.5 popularity has already made it the most popular model on OpenRouter & for OpenClaw users.

Now it is stepping up customer capture & user stickiness w/ Kimi Claw. It has to keep close to SOTA in these critical areas for customer stickiness
Feb 14 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Long term, ByteDance & Doubao team is always going to have the most cutting edge model from China since it has the most resources & data. Its also not constrained in size of model, so Doubao 2.0 Pro is going to be better than the open src labs, who have to release smaller models. Image ByteDance/Seed team looked at the MaaS demand & targeted those areas in its model.

Note the corporate demand in processing knowledge content with mixed charts, documents, and other unstructured information.

BD is battling Alibaba & Tencent for business users. Image
Feb 12 • 5 tweets • 4 min read
So, we finally have 09V, 110m long, 12-13m beam, likely single/hybrid, w/ X tail & Pumpjet.

Essentially, Chinese seawolf
1st SSN designed after China had reached competence in nuclear supply chain, high end steel, precision mfg & sensors -> finally allowing more the large sub that PLAN always wanted.

USS Jimmy Carter & Virginia class Block 4 are all ~140m long, so they could presumably extend this one that long to accommodate a larger mission bay.

That doesn't need to happen for a while. The lead boat will need to go through sea trials for a while & enter service by around 2030 (if we use the initial 093 timeline). Likely pause for a couple of yrs to fix problems found in testing b4 mass production really ramps up. They will likely build a lot more 093Bs b4 then.

Given that SSN quietness is essentially determined by noise produced by the machines inside the submarine & the passive noise absorbers all around (which itself is determined by interior space). There is no reason to think that China's mechE & material science tech is inferior to what USN had access to back in 1995, I see no reason why this sub would not be at least as quiet as Seawolf class.

ofc, at certain pt, SSNs essentially are as quiet as surrounding waters & then the subs effectiveness can then be determined by factors like its advanced sensors, compute server farm, mission payload and how well it can conceal communication w/ aerial assets.Image This sub + follow-on 09VI will significant shift global balance of power, but especially in Pacific.

RAN + AUKUS supporters should really think about the implication here.

Seawolf vs Virginia sized sub
Feb 8 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
Every country should strive for energy independence & not depend on hydrocarbon powers.

Reminder that China is world's 4th largest NG producer & has world's largest shale reserves. Production cost of shale is 20% cheaper than pipeline gas.

China doesn't need Russian oil/gas. Image
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Image China also does not depend on Russian pipeline since it gets more gas that way thru Central Asian republics + 12 bcm from Myanmar.

China's increased NG production means it has reached 61% self sufficiency while LNG demand has collapsed. Pipeline import increased due to lower px. Image
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Feb 6 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
MIIT filings had some interesting new EVs:
1st, we have Tang 9 EV here
Comes in AWD 215+370kW or 300/370 RWD
240 to 250 km/h top speed!
4.9s from 0 to 100
Dimension 5263/1999/1790mm wheelbase 3130, seats 7
BYD going full electric on full sized SUV is big deal
-> battery energy density/cost & charging speed are now good enough to allow for this
BYD used to only do PHEVs for large SUVs.Image Next is BEV version of the popular Tai-7 Box SUV.
Dimension 5050/1995/1865mm wheelbase 2920
Comes in AWD 215+300 kW or RWD 300 kW

Another medium-large SUV getting BEV version.
Sign of maturing super ePlatform & battery tech. Image
Image
Feb 3 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
China's import, export, consumption & production data of Gold from 2025.

932.5t imported in 2025, down 448t YoY, but import bill of 726B RMB was just 0.6% behind 2024.

In fact, Gold was the 4th largest import item in 2025 behind Semi, Oil & Iron Ore.

Gold import masked the size of China's trade surplus in 2025, imagine that. Even w/ China settling some surpluses thru gold, it still ran a $1.2T surplus.Image This happened while Gold was the largest export item out of America in Oct & Nov, even more than aircraft & oil.

Picture of America sending gold bars to China while getting $ back has never been so accurate. Image
Image
Feb 1 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Much underappreciated in China's energy transition/security drive is its NG plan.

Deep concerted effort in both driving up domestic production & pipeline import to lower import of expensive & geopolitically risky LNG.

Self sufficiency rate now above 60% while pipeline may have surpassed LNG in tonnage this yr.Image Important pts from Nikkei article below:
Domestic shale is 50% than imported LNG & 20% cheaper than even Russians pipeline gas.

LNG import fell 11% to 68.43mt, while pipeline has increased -> led to import bill dropping by 12.5% in $ amt, even tho qty just dropped by 2.8% Image
Feb 1 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
CCTV reports on exploding order backlog for UHV large capacity transformers from domestic & foreign customers, including North American ones, especially from AI customers.

There are ~3000 transformer companies in China, mostly in Guangdong & Jiangsu. 60% of global capacity.

A Jiangsu factory has order book for until until of 2027. China's domestic transformer mkt grew by > 20% YoY w/ AI computing & UHV transformer orders growing 35% YoY.

Delivery time for US mkt has grown from 50 to 127 wk.
EDWC project is generating huge domestic demand. Image
Image
Jan 25 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
My thread on China's silver trade & what's happened in the past 2 months has silver px skyrocketed in China.

1st, Silver has huge & growing industrial demand, especially in the age of PVs, EVs & AI. Consumer demand is sky-rocketing in China -> Why China put in export controls. Image
Image 75% of silver is by product of mining other metals, which can be separated & processed into Silver concentrate b4 being smelt & refined to 99.99% grade

China produced 3300t of silver concentrate in 2024, just 13% of global production, so it has to import massive amount of Ag to feed smelters. Not so different from other metals.Image
Image
Jan 6 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
It’s unclear to me how stringent this will be enforced since Japan is a major intermediate player in supply chain. Does this mean Ga won’t be exported to Japan?

This could affect far more than just Japan. Also, is China ready for possible Japanese retaliation? Image Dual-use list can be found here
Includes Ga, Ge, Sb, Scandium, yttrium, Lutetium, dysprosium, terbium, gadolinium, samarium & whole bunch of chemicals.
+ upstream material like UHMWPE, graphite, high end Al/Ti alloy, complex fibersxkzj.mofcom.gov.cn/tzgg/art/2026/…
Dec 31, 2025 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
CXMT has filed updated 2025 guidance as part of its IPO filings. It had generated revenues of 8.3B, 9.1B, 15.4B RMB from 2022-2024 & 24.2B in 2025H1.

Now, it expects 55-58B for 2025 & turning profit for the 1st time.
Likely up to $3B in rev in Q4, making it bigger than SMIC. Image CXMT has 3 12-inch fabs (~20k wpm each) in Hefei & Beijing. It plans to raise 29.5B RMB off IPO out of 34.5B it needs for DRAM tech upgrade, production line upgrade & R&D.

CXMT invested 15.2B in R&D from 2022-2024, 36.6% of its revenue. It seeks to keep that at ~30% going fwd. Image
Dec 18, 2025 • 8 tweets • 5 min read
ByteDance's Doubao/Seed team has unveiled Seed1.8.
While it is a huge improvement over 1.5, it does noticeably trail Gemini-3 & GPT-5 on most of the LLM benchmarks.

They do seem to focus on Search & "Economically Valuable Fields", where they are SOTA based on benchmarks. Image
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Image Among other benchmarks, they do quite well on the Visual & Video generation as well as VLM (not a surprise if you've seen their rankings on artificial analysis for this), but not so competitive on coding.

-> Their unique data set from apps are a huge advantage in video & visual Image
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Dec 9, 2025 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
As Gemini caught up to GPT, Google AI Ecosystem is getting a huge boost. What if as Marc says, AI is commodified? As in, OpenAI cannot maintain indefinite lead & command high premium vs Google & Anthropic?

Google can undercut OpenAI/Anthropic until those 2 go out of business. Image
Image Using IBM chief Krishna's comment, each GW of DC cost $80B, which means 100GW of DC requires $8T of capex + opex (like electricity cost, taxes & staff) + interest. Interest alone is $800B
5 yr cycle -> $1.6T depreciation/yr.
+ opex & engineers -> over $3T in cost per yr for AI. Image
Dec 8, 2025 • 18 tweets • 9 min read
As expected, US's latest National Security Strategy doc embraces old model & rejects new model. We already know about China's dominance in the "New 3" (EVs, Solar & Batteries), but 15th FYP show China's full embrace of Hydrogen & Biomanufacturing. How new replaces the old model. Image China is seeing rapidly declining demand for diesel & gas. Diesel HDT ratio has shrunk to 40% recently as EVs & LNG ones exploded. In pax vehicle mkt, NEV penetration is also at 60% for Nov.

Effect on WTI px, Permian rigs & US mfg is for all to see
Dec 3, 2025 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
Welcome to the "Doubao Phone" - Collaboration bw ByteDance & Nubia/ZTE which uses a new BD OS.

Already hailed by some as the 1st real AI-centric phone. Everything here tied to Douyin account & Doubao AI features. AI Agent simply listens to your command & carries out the task Alibaba's great competition to this is its new Quark AI phone which uses Qwen.

In this world, Android becomes less important & the foundational AI model becomes the OS driving everyone.

Nov 9, 2025 • 18 tweets • 7 min read
Just how large is China's compute & overall AI infrastructure? A good place to start is just by looking at Doubao/ByteDance numbers, since they are the largest player in the China mkt.
Grew from 4T tokens/day in 2024/12 to 30T tokens/day last month. Same ballpark as Google's 43T Image If we look at In-App AI in China, the top players are Baidu, Douyin (Doubao here), Wechat, Tencent news, Alipay, Gaode, Weibo, Douyin light speed, Baidu fast & Quark.

All major search apps in China also query AI just like Google does in US. Wide spread AI-based searches. Image
Nov 4, 2025 • 16 tweets • 6 min read
HW isn't the only one in China working hard at optical module network or SuperNode or OCS.

Xizhi Tech showcased its LightSphere X distributed OCS all optical SuperNode @ WAIC 2025.

It partnered w/ Biren Tech & its BR166L GPU + ZTE to connect together 2000 GPUs in 1 SuperNode. Image
Image InnoLight is the biggest player in the optical module industry. It's rumored to be Google's sole OCS supplier & will also supply 1.6T modules to Google & Nvidia + domestic customers. Eoptolink's 1.6T optical module has also been validated by Nvidia & its 800G supplies Google. Image
Nov 3, 2025 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
HW's Atlas 950/960 SuperPoD are truly innovative products. It offsets China's disadvantage in advanced node chip fabrication by increasing memory, optimizing for FP4/8 & building large super node using HW's networking expertise.

More smaller AI die connected like it's all in 1. Image HW utilizes an all optical network built w/ OCS (optical circuit switch). OCS is not new. Google built super nodes w/ 4096 TPUs.

HW tries to scale up this further w/ OXC (optical cross connect) to address limitation of increasing complex web of connections as # of nodes grow. Image
Nov 1, 2025 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Laser is a cornerstone tech for other advanced techs like fiber optics, Lidar, laser cutting/cleaning machines & ofc laser interferometer.

China was weak in high-end laser until recent, but has now built full supply chain. Big players are Han's laser, HGTech & Wuhan Raycus.

Requires upstream breakthroughs in optical/electronic material, optical/laser chips, digital control, solid state laser, mechanical system, power source & gas laser machines.

Different types of lasers require different upstream supply chain.Image See below for domestic ratio of 1-3kw to 10kw+ from 2019 to 2023:

In 2019, China produced 20% of laser it needed above 6kw. By 2023, it produced 86% of its 10kw+ demand, 77% of 6-10kw & 99% in sub-6kw laser mkt.

all this happened while demand exploded across the board. Image