World AI Conference 2026 Attracts 1,100+ Companies, 2,000+ Products, and Investor Enthusiasm

By the Huangpu River, crowds thronged.

The annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference has arrived as scheduled, and this year’s event is astonishing—exhibition space has exceeded 100,000 square meters for the first time, with over 1,100 companies showcasing more than 3,000 products, and over 300 products making their global debut. The venue is packed with attendees, generating immense excitement.

“It’s incredible—without booking in advance, you can’t even get a hotel room nearby.” An AI investor from Beijing had secured his travel plans last month. On the high-speed train to Shanghai, he unexpectedly encountered several other industry peers.

Even more extreme are the tickets: the regular ticket, originally priced at 168 yuan, has been scalped up to 2,000 yuan. “You can’t even buy one if you have the money,” remarked an investor who managed to secure a ticket through a portfolio company. “This is likely the most popular WAIC ever.”

“If you didn’t show up, you’re not a qualified AI investor”—this FOMO sentiment subtly lingers.

WAIC has entered its ninth year, serving as a condensed history of AI evolution.

Stepping onto the floor, an energetic atmosphere immediately surrounds you. Just two or three years ago, the most prominent features on exhibitor booths were model parameters, context length, and Benchmark rankings. In 2025, physical prototypes and Agent demonstrations have begun appearing on the show floors.

This year, all exhibitors presented products that can operate in real-world scenarios, even disclosing concrete figures for mass production and delivery. From comparing specifications to comparing real-world implementation, AI has finally stepped out from the screen.

This year’s WAIC is the first to adopt a coordinated “three locations, four venues” model, featuring Zhangjiang, the World Expo, and Xuhui. Among these, the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition & Convention Center is the largest venue with the most comprehensive industry coverage and the highest concentration of global product launches—H1 showcases industrial applications, H2 highlights foundational computing power, H3 focuses on robotics, and H4 highlights startup projects.

Hall H1 showcases the practical advancements of large models and agents. MiniMax M3, InfiniClawBox Secure Data Masking Agent Kimi On the opening day, it also unveiled its most powerful model, K3. Hall H2 resembled a computing power parade, where Huawei made its debut with the industry’s largest-scale super-node, the Atlas 950 SuperPoD, showcasing 1,024 Ascend chips—a scale 56.8 times that of NVIDIA’s NVL144 solution.

The most popular pavilion is undoubtedly Hall H3, a paradise for robotics enthusiasts. Over 200 leading robotics companies, 208 embodied intelligent terminals, and more than 300 live robots are undergoing synchronized dynamic demonstrations, leaving the venue packed to capacity.

Unitree Technology unveiled the world’s first manned transforming mecha, GD01; AgiBot showcased its “Workforce Team,” bringing an actual production line into the exhibition hall; and Itseez A1 robot demonstrated its operational capabilities on a real industrial production line. Additionally, Joyson, Galaxy General, CrossDimension Intelligence, Flexiv, Qianxun Intelligence, Geesu, and ZhiJi Power also introduced their next-generation embodied robots, with the gap widening between those that can “walk” and those that can “do.”

The Xuhui West Bund venue was equally vibrant. Shengshu Technology, Bilibili, and Tencent clustered in the Digital Perception zone; Huawei Honor, NetEase Youdao, and iFlytek showcased the latest AI-powered everyday devices, alongside lightweight, nearly imperceptible products like Rokid·Lucky AI glasses, Liangliang Vision Hey2 AR translation glasses, and Xinmou Technology Monet AI glasses. The Zhangjiang zone brought together over a hundred computing chip companies, with nearly all major domestic GPU manufacturers present, unveiling 67 products making their debut in China.

Many familiar faces also unveiled new achievements: Xiaohongshu showcased its RED Skill and Vibe Coding content ecosystem, Baitype Intelligence launched its new product OntoZ, Qiyuan Robotics introduced T1, the world’s first deformable personal robot, and Mianbi Intelligence, in collaboration with the Zhiyuan Institute, released its latest report.

The list is still very, very long.

"WAIC is negotiable," AI investors collectively updated their WeChat signatures.

Investors in AI naturally wouldn’t miss this annual AI event. “A single post in my circle of contacts makes it easy to gather a group and head to Shanghai,” said a fellow investor in the industry who organized the trip, barely concealing his excitement.

Looking around, investors can be found everywhere. The WAIC Future-Tech Venture Capital zone in Hall H4 brings together over 160 outstanding startups, more than 70% of which were founded within the past three years, and over 50% of whom are founded by individuals born in the 1990s. More than 80 leading investment firms—including Sequoia Capital China, Hillhouse Capital, and ZhenFund—have set up dedicated capital matchmaking areas. The next unicorn may well emerge from here.

You absolutely must see the six leading world models side by side. During the conference, the founders of the six top world model companies gathered for a dedicated roundtable: Tao Dacheng (founder of DaXiao Robotics), Shen Yujun (Chief Scientist of Ant Group’s Lingbo), Zhu Zheng (CEO of Jijia Vision), Xia Zhongpu (CTO of WuJie Power), Ren Guanghui (Technical Lead of Agi Robotics), and Wang Hao (CTO of Ziduan Robotics). This is a moment that investors in physical AI won’t want to miss.

The presence of Shanghai State Investment is also impressive, as its hosted “POWER·Open Mic” event brings together leading companies in key sectors such as computing power, algorithms, data, embodied intelligence, and AI applications. Additionally, Zhou Zhifeng, Managing Partner at Qiming Venture Partners, will unveil the “Qiming Venture Partners Top 10 AI Outlooks for 2026” at the forum.

This year, side events led by investment firms were equally火爆. BlueRun Ventures hosted Booming Night, Source Code Capital launched WAIC After Hours, Linear Capital organized an AI-themed “True vs. False Melon King Showdown” along the Huangpu River, Mapletree Capital held “Tsinghua Tech Night,” and Jinyou Fund hosted Founders Back Founders.

Other venture capital and FA firms, including Five Rings Capital, Yunqi Capital, Jiuhé Ventures, Mingshi Capital, Starlink Capital, Changshi Capital, MiraclePlus, Gaohu Capital, and Lightsource Capital, have all launched their respective initiatives.

This has clearly kept investors busy—20,000 steps a day is no exaggeration.

Their schedules are broken into half-hour blocks: morning viewing the live debut of AI chip hardware, lunchtime private deep-dive with founders of embodied AI, afternoon attending three vertical-sector roundtables, and evening back-to-back private pitch sessions and after-parties. If you invested in AI but didn’t attend WAIC, you likely missed China’s most authentic and fascinating AI developments.

The popularity of WAIC is a vivid reflection of this year's AI investment boom.

Public data shows that, in the first half of 2026, total funding in China’s embodied AI sector exceeded RMB 90 billion, more than five times the amount from the same period last year. If the scope is expanded to the entire AI sector, there were 1,203 funding events in the first half of the year, with total funding surpassing RMB 300 billion—far exceeding the full-year total for 2025.

In other words, the AI sector alone absorbed half of venture capital funds in the first half of the year.

One after another, unicorns with valuations in the billions are emerging. Names such as Yunshen Deep, Zibianliang, Zhifangping, Xinghai Tu, Qianxun Intelligence, Zhongqing Intelligence, Xingdong Jiyuan, Zhuji Power, and Kuawei Intelligence have successively crossed that threshold.

The enthusiasm on the financing side quickly spread to the IPO front. According to incomplete statistics, at least 20 intelligent companies this year have clearly announced their IPO plans. Quietly, going public has become a life-or-death race—those who reach the capital markets first have a greater chance of staying on the table.

Unitree is about to list on the STAR Market, opening a window for the industry. Everyone is wondering: Will a Chinese embodied AI company finally take center stage on the global stage? This is the most imaginative part of China’s embodied intelligence narrative.

Outside the venue, discussions about the next billion- and trillion-dollar companies are happening everywhere. “The internet produced trillion-dollar companies, and artificial intelligence will too—faster than the internet did,” said a managing partner at a dual-currency fund in Shanghai.

This is not fantasy. Zhipu's market capitalization once surged past one trillion. DeepSeek Latest valuation exceeds $350 billion; reportedly preparing for a STAR Market IPO; valuation exceeds $200 billion Kimi The Hong Kong stock listing is expected to be completed within as little as six months. Meanwhile, looking overseas, while Anthropic and OpenAI are valued at trillions of dollars, China’s AI sector has yet to reach its ceiling.

The flow of money always has far-reaching effects.

Right now, investors moving between booths hold their resources and are gradually mapping out the technological landscape of the next decade. Perhaps the next trillion-dollar company is hidden in a booth, a private meeting, or an unexpected conversation. No one wants to miss it.

This article is from the WeChat public account "Investment Daily" (ID: pedaily2012), authored by Zhou Jiali.