CNBC's The China Connection newsletter: China learns to build without Nvidia

An iFlytek liquid-cooled server equipped with Huawei Kunpeng 920 chips and Ascend AI chips, on display at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China on July 26, 2025. Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images Hi, this is Evelyn, writing to you from Beijing. Welcome to the latest edition of The China Connection — a succinct snapshot of what I'm seeing and hearing from local businesses. China's tech self-sufficiency push is rapidly becoming a reality as companies focus on business questions that run deeper than geopolitics. What does that mean for Nvidia? The big story Robovan startup Zelostech plans to use multiple chip suppliers from China and elsewhere, over the next year or two, instead of relying only on Nvidia for its self-driving systems, the company told CNBC. A major factor is cost, said Shi Yunjian, director of finance and investment. Using China-made chips, for example, would cost far less than the two Nvidia Orin chipsets currently used in each vehicle, he said. That's a big deal because scale is becoming a competitive advantage. The more autonomous vehicles can deploy, the more operating data they can collect and the easier it becomes to convince regulators that the technology is ready for wider use. Zelostech claims it already has more than 25,000 vehicles operating in over 20 countries, with plans to expand rapidly. These don't carry people, and many are smaller than a mail truck. …