China's AI race is accelerating on the track and the payroll
As humanoid robots beat human records at games in China, the country's chip companies are using equity worth millions of yuan to retain key engineers; the contest spans both hardware and talent.
Artificial Intelligence··Midday
A humanoid robot ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds
An X-Humanoid machine ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds on the opening day of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, passing Usain Bolt's world record of 9.58 seconds. A robot from phone maker Honor had already reached 9.32 seconds in a trial run. In the standing high jump, another X-Humanoid robot cleared 2.88 metres against the human record of 2.45 metres. The five-day event at the National Speed Skating Oval brings together more than 2,000 robots from 16 countries across 51 events. The year-on-year pace is clearest in the jump: the robot record in 2025 stood at 0.95 metres.[1]
Cambricon is extending shares to 85.3 percent of its workforce
Chinese AI-chip designer Cambricon unlocked nearly 600,000 shares for 124 key employees. On the calculation reported by the South China Morning Post, the average value reached 5.57 million yuan per person. The company has also granted 5 million shares to 944 employees under a plan running to 2028, covering 85.3 percent of its workforce. Equity extends beyond a one-off payment for a few senior executives and becomes a multi-year form of compensation for a broad group of engineers. The value attached to those awards shows the financial scale of the contest to retain technical workers at China's AI-chip companies.[2]
Optical-link and manufacturing teams are joining the equity plans
Zhongji InnoLight, which makes optical transceivers for AI data centres, allocated 2.48 million shares to 99 key employees in its latest vesting round. At the announcement-day price, the average return per person exceeded 26 million yuan. AMEC, a maker of semiconductor-manufacturing equipment, disclosed a restricted-share plan in March covering more than 97 percent of its workforce. These examples show that equity-based retention is not confined to chip designers; it reaches across the supply chain from optical data-centre links to production equipment.[2]
