TheChek News Flow

Vanke is one of China’s largest real-estate companies

China Vanke’s 000002 -1.99%decrease; red down pointing triangle shares fell after its bondholders rejected a proposal to extend a bond payment, fueling fears that authorities may not offer support to keep the developer afloat.

The company’s shares fell 3.8% in Hong Kong to 3.54 Hong Kong dollars as of midday Monday, equivalent to 45 U.S. cents, while its Shenzhen-listed shares fell 2.2% to 4.91 yuan.

The property developer said early Monday that it failed to secure bondholder support for a one-year extension of a bond payment due Monday.

Vanke, one of China’s largest real-estate companies, said its three proposals to extend bond payments were rejected. The proposal to extend principal and interest payments was rejected, with 76.7% of holders rejecting it. Two other proposals that included credit-enhancement measures won some backing but all three were short of the over 90% threshold support needed.

“It’s a sign that the Chinese government may have decided to give up on rescuing Vanke,” Daiwa analyst William Wu said, adding that the outcome has been priced in by markets.

A lot of Vanke’s bondholders are state-owned, Wu said, adding that the developer’s largest shareholder, Shenzhen Metro, also faces cash flow pressures.

The three-day vote ended Friday, with Vanke given a grace period of five working days to pay 2 billion yuan, equivalent to US$283.5 million, on the onshore bond, according to a filing on Monday to the National Association of Financial Market Institutional Investors.

Vanke said Monday that it will hold a bondholder meeting on Thursday to discuss next steps for the 2 billion yuan note.

Vanke’s bondholders may demand more credit enhancement or earlier repayment of some principal for the bonds due Dec. 15, said Morningstar analyst Jeff Zhang. That is close to being approved, “so we are hopeful that a deal could be reached in the next five days,” Zhang said.

The developer had been the outlier among its privately owned peers that have undergone restructuring or liquidation since the yearslong downturn in China’s property sector began. It had managed to stay afloat with the support of state-owned Shenzhen Metro.

In early November, Vanke said it could borrow up to 22 billion yuan from Shenzhen Metro before June 30, 2026, with 2.29 billion yuan still available for withdrawal.

Industry watchers have long viewed Vanke as a barometer of how much pain Chinese authorities could tolerate amid the real-estate slump.

However, officials’ stance toward the property sector seemed to have cooled somewhat following the implementation of stimulus last year, while stronger-than-expected exports have supported the economy’s around 5% growth target.

“Policymakers have this year pivoted back to a relatively cool stance towards the sector, even downgrading property from a growth driver to a livelihood issue in their ‘recommendations’ for the next five-year plan,” Gavekal Dragonomics analyst Xiaoxi Zhang wrote in a recent note.

Vanke’s bondholders rejecting its proposal isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the property sector, Daiwa’s Wu said.

“In the medium term, it may remind policymakers that the property sector still needs some kind of policy support,” he added.

Average price of a home coming to market in the four weeks to December 6 fell to £358,138, says Rightmove

Asking prices for UK homes are £2,000 lower than at the end of last year following uncertainty around property tax rises in the lead-up to the Budget.

The average price of a property coming to market in the four weeks to December 6 was £358,138, which is 0.6 per cent — or £2,059 — lower than the same period a year ago, Rightmove said on Monday. In contrast, last year ended with the average asking price £5,000 higher than at the end of 2023.

It comes after a larger than usual fall in asking prices between November and December of 1.8 per cent. While there is usually a dip in December, this year’s price fall was higher than the average drop over the past 10 years of 1.4 per cent.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Budget on November 26 introduced a “mansion tax” surcharge on properties worth more than £2mn as well as a 2 percentage point increase in rates of property income tax.

But speculation of upcoming property tax rises was already circulating in August, contributing to more subdued activity throughout the second half of the year, Rightmove data showed.

Claire Reynolds, UK head of sales at property consultancy Strutt & Parker, said: “The weeks of speculation leading up to the autumn Budget certainly cooled the property market, especially for those making discretionary moves.”

The number of new sellers coming to market in the second half of 2025 was 4 per cent below the same period last year, having been 9 per cent ahead year on year in the first half.

Similarly, the number of prospective buyers contacting estate agents was 6 per cent lower in the second half of the year than in 2024, after being 3 per cent higher in the first six months.

Four-bedroom detached houses and properties with at least five bedrooms registered the largest month-on-month fall in prices, Rightmove said, dropping 2.4 per cent to an average of £642,131 in December.

Asking prices for properties with two bedrooms or fewer fell by a smaller 1.4 per cent.

The figures are based on about 66,000 asking prices for properties that were put on sale by estate agents and advertised on the Rightmove portal.

However, financial markets believe there is a high probability that the Bank of England will cut interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point to 3.75 per cent on Thursday, which would help reduce mortgage rates.

Improved buyer affordability and plenty of choice for buyers also suggest a rebound in activity in 2026, according to Rightmove, which predicts new seller asking prices rising by 2 per cent over the year.

Colleen Babcock, property expert at Rightmove, said: “With market conditions supporting higher levels of activity, and a hopefully more certain economic environment, we forecast a better year for price growth in 2026, with a strong rebound in activity to kick-start the year.”

Deepening decline and weakest retail sales growth in 3 years underline challenge for Beijing

China’s investment fell for the third straight month in November, official data showed, just days after President Xi Jinping called on officials to reverse a decline that threatens to undermine growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

Fixed asset investment for the year to date to November 30 declined 2.6 per cent on a year earlier, a steeper fall than the 2.3 per cent decline forecast by a Bloomberg survey of analysts and October’s fall of 1.7 per cent.

The decline is expected to drive calls from China’s top leadership to “stabilise” investment in an economy that for decades has relied heavily on state financing for growth, particularly in infrastructure and property as well as high-end manufacturing.

Last week, the central economic work conference, the Communist party’s top meeting on the economy presided over by Xi, said “China will work to stabilise and revive investment, [and] appropriately increase the scale of investment within the central government budget”.

Analysts believe this was the first official acknowledgment from China’s leadership of the investment slowdown.

Last month’s retail sales growth, meanwhile, was the weakest in three years, reflecting flagging domestic consumption and low household confidence amid a property sector slowdown now entering its fifth year.

The IMF last week called on Beijing to take stronger measures to stimulate domestic demand and reflate its economy, which has suffered persistent deflation.

Goldman Sachs analysts estimated that about 60 per cent of the falls in fixed asset investment up until October was due to statistical corrections of previously over-reported data.

But they said that 40 per cent of the decline could be attributed to the property market slowdown, infrastructure-related fiscal spending and Beijing’s “anti-involution” policies. These are measures by the top leadership to rein in sectors with severe price competition, which economists say is usually caused by overcapacity.

The National Bureau of Statistics also reported on Monday that retail sales grew 1.3 per cent last month on a year earlier, the slowest pace of growth since December 2022 and short of Bloomberg’s analyst forecasts of 2.9 per cent, which would have been in line with October’s figure.

Industrial production rose 4.8 per cent year on year, trailing analyst forecasts of 5 per cent growth and October’s rate of 4.9 per cent.

“November activity data broadly missed market expectations, especially for retail sales,” Goldman Sachs said in an analyst note. It said fixed asset investment growth “remained depressed”, with a year-on-year decline of 10.7 per cent in November on a single-month basis against 11.4 per cent in October.

But Goldman Sachs cautioned against over-interpreting the slump, as “recent study suggests that the NBS statistical correction of previously over-reported data has played at least as large a role as fundamental factors”.

Unlike other major economies, China does not publish full quarterly breakdowns of GDP under what is known as the expenditure approach, which include investment, consumption and net exports.

Instead, it publishes its own monthly data series, such as fixed asset investment and retail sales, which are closely watched in the absence of more detailed GDP data.

Since 2018, the statistics bureau has also stopped reporting sectoral breakdowns of fixed asset investment by value, leaving only growth rates across different sectors.

Chinese authorities have set a full-year growth target of about 5 per cent for 2025. In the third quarter, data showed the economy expanded 4.8 per cent, the slowest pace in a year. Economists expect China to hit the 5 per cent target this year.

Owners of UK’s two biggest roadside recovery businesses expected to exit next year

The AA, the UK’s biggest roadside recovery business, has been sounding out potential buyers ahead of a potential £5bn sale as its rival RAC steers towards a potential London listing as soon as next year.

The AA, owned by a consortium including TowerBrook Capital Partners, Warburg Pincus and Stonepeak, is working with advisers at Rothschild and JPMorgan on options for the business.

The business is valued at £5bn and has had expressions of interest around that level from private equity firms and strategic buyers, said three people close to the situation. A potential London listing is an option, the people added.

TowerBrook, Warburg Pincus and Stonepeak all declined to comment.

Meanwhile, the RAC is working on a potential stock market listing and is also targeting a £5bn valuation, said two people familiar with the situation. It is owned by CVC Capital Partners, GIC, Singapore’s investment fund, and Silver Lake Partners. A sale is also a possibility, even if an initial public offering is the more likely exit route, the people added.

CVC, GIC and Silver Lake all declined to comment.

City advisers have commented on how unusual it is to have two very comparable businesses, with similar valuations in the market at the same time. One banker said it would test the boundaries of investor appetite if they were both to opt for listing shares on the London Stock Exchange.

The AA was taken private in 2020 for just £219mn after six rocky years as a listed company, when it struggled with the debts heaped on it by previous private equity owners, CVC and Permira. It was listed with a £1.4bn valuation and £2.6bn debt pile.

As well as poor performance and profit warnings, it was also embroiled in a boardroom drama in 2017 when its former executive chair, Bob Mackenzie, was fired for punching a colleague.

The AA now claims to have transformed itself by reducing its debt to 4.1 times earnings, compared to 6.7 times when it was a public company.

It posted a 5 per cent increase in revenue to £623mn in the first half of 2025, and an 8 per cent increase in adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation to £243mn.

It has 17mn customers, making it the largest in the sector and has recently signed a deal with OpenAI alongside its insurance, driving schools and mobile repair vans.

The RAC has 15mn members. Its revenues rose 8 per cent in the first half to £411mn and it posted a 12 per cent increase in earnings to £152mn.

Both companies are expected to highlight to prospective new owners and investors the growth opportunities from the rising adoption of electric vehicles, which require extra technical maintenance when they break down.

EVs typically break down because of faults with their 12-volt batteries and because of tyre damage. This is caused because they are typically heavier than cars with combustion engines.

European institutions and capitals divided over how far to push back against Washington without hurting Ukraine

Donald Trump’s assault on the EU has opened rifts within the bloc’s executive and set national leaders at odds, threatening to paralyse Europe’s response over fears that standing up to the US will hurt Ukraine.

Trump has lambasted EU leaders as “weak” and issued a security strategy that called for “cultivating resistance” on the continent, reflecting disdain for European institutions that his officials see as “adverse” to US interests and bent on “civilisational suicide”.

The co-ordinated attack on the EU this month, which also drew on long-standing criticism of the bloc’s digital regulations, sustainability laws and approach to migration, prompted widespread shock inside the European Commission and disagreement over how to respond, according to officials.

Commission president Ursula von der Leyen was urged not to retaliate in Europe’s defence, the people said, in an attempt to smother the conflict and try to maintain US engagement with the Ukraine peace process.

Other senior EU officials were outraged that the Trump administration’s barrage was being met with silence.

That weak response prompted some national leaders to suggest that Brussels be bypassed as a conduit to Trump, challenging the previous united approach that saw the EU negotiate with Washington as a 27-strong bloc.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Thursday that if Trump “cannot relate” to the EU institutions, as appeared “quite obvious”, then “at least there are individual member states, including Germany first and foremost, of course, with which such co-operation can continue”.

Other national officials were also discussing how to bypass the Commission and talk to the US president about European issues bilaterally, an EU leader told the Financial Times.

Despite the intensity of the Trump criticism, the ongoing peace talks in Ukraine have complicated the response given Kyiv’s fate is largely dependent on maintaining a working relationship with the US. It has forced the EU to believe it needs to absorb criticism rather than hit back, for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s sake.

“We can hardly tell Zelenskyy: ‘Look we’ve supported you all this way but now we have some more important stuff to focus on like sustainability rules and social media fines,’” said one of the people.

Zelenskyy and Nato secretary-general Mark Rutte last week asked von der Leyen not to criticise Trump in response to his attacks, two people briefed on their interactions told the FT.

“We told ourselves in the summer that we were negotiating three different deals with the US,” the EU leader said, referring to a EU-US trade deal, a new Nato spending pledge and a military supply line for Ukraine. “But we were kidding ourselves. It was always just one negotiation: keeping the US in Europe.”

“Now that is crystal clear, but also so is the lack of a clear response,” they added.

Some officials compared the EU’s approach to its strategy around trade negotiations with Trump’s administration this summer. Hit with large tariffs and threatened with more, the bloc chose not to retaliate and instead agreed a deal that imposed 15 per cent levies on its imports and has been widely analysed by experts as pro-American appeasement.

“The text on Europe in the National Security strategy is a scandal. It undermines 80 years of bipartisan policy,” said Anthony Gardner, former US ambassador to the EU. “The Trump administration has declared war on the EU. It has been clear for some time, but now it is official policy. Our friends are now our enemies.”

“The EU’s unbalanced trade agreement with the US is now revealed to have been based on hopelessly naive hopes of buying US commitment to Europe and Ukraine,” he added.

The US president’s assault, and the increased focus on maintaining his engagement with Ukraine, has particularly complicated Brussels’ handling of its tech regulations, which was already a geopolitical minefield for the Commission’s regulatory enforcers.

The Commission has repeatedly stressed that its tech regulations, aimed at opening markets and setting a regulatory framework for Silicon Valley giants, were non-negotiable and objectively applied. But it has struggled over the past year to push ahead with enforcement, partly because of concerns over how Trump and his allies in Silicon Valley would react.

The Commission has opened probes into Amazon and Microsoft’s dominance in the cloud sector, launched investigations into the artificial intelligence models of Google and Meta’s WhatsApp, and last week handed out a €120mn fine to Elon Musk’s X for breaking digital transparency rules.

But those decisions have been carefully balanced in order to avoid drawing the ire of Trump, with new decisions against American tech companies often coinciding with the closing of another case. The Commission has also pressed with high-profile cases against companies from other jurisdictions, such as Chinese online marketplaces Temu and Shein.

Officials involved in the investigations said that striking the balance was hard because there was a constant push from the European parliament and others to enforce its digital rule book without compromise.

“We are not going to accept any kind of subordination on how we play our roles,” said Teresa Ribera, von der Leyen’s vice-president and the Commission’s competition chief told reporters on Tuesday. “On the contrary, we are going to stand up and defend what I think is our duty.”

Ribera’s rhetoric is not expected to be fully matched by Commission action, the officials said, at least while there is still belief that the US can be steered towards a fair peace deal in Ukraine.

“I think they’re weak,” Trump said of Europe’s leaders. “But I also think that they want to be so politically correct.”

“I think they don’t know what to do,” he told Politico. “Europe doesn’t know what to do.”

It’s not just because of the SpaceX IPO. AI companies are getting impatient with building data centers on Earth, or at least in the U.S.

Every so often, prominent figures in tech begin amplifying the same topic so energetically that it makes you wonder if they’re all on the same group chat (or if the hive mind from “Pluribus,” the Apple TV+ sci-fi show, is a real thing). One such moment occurred this past week, when it became hard to escape the deafening online chatter about data centers in space.

That was in large part thanks to Elon Musk, who began promoting the concept through a series of posts on X. It isn’t just Musk hyping the concept, though. Amazon executive chair and founder Jeff Bezos and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have both been big believers for a while. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also jumped on the bandwagon.

Last month, Google, one of the biggest cloud providers, said it plans to launch prototype satellites by 2027 to see how its AI chips, called tensor processing units, perform in space. And this week, a space data center startup, Starcloud, said it had trained the first large language model in space aboard a demonstration satellite outfitted with an Nvidia graphics processing unit.

On one hand, this is an exhilarating vision, especially if you’re a sci-fi nerd. But there’s also a more pessimistic interpretation of the sudden enthusiasm of so many smart, powerful AI barons for sticking data centers in space—namely, they don’t think the U.S. can meet the compute needs of the AI industry on terra firma. That makes sense, as we’ll explain. First, though, we should acknowledge that some of the proponents of data centers in space—Musk in particular—have other agendas.

As we first reported 10 days ago, Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, is currently eyeing the second half of next year for an initial public offering. SpaceX already had a good story to tell investors—about the dominance of its rocket-launching business and Starlink satellite internet service. Adding the idea that SpaceX could accelerate the launch of data centers into space allows the company to tap into the mother of all investor narratives, AI—just as Musk has sought to do with his other public company, Tesla, through initiatives like its Optimus humanoid robot.

To say that the vision of orbiting data centers has its skeptics would be a radical understatement. Radiation will cook their AI chips, these critics say. Servicing them when they malfunction or replacing the chips when they’re obsolete will be, shall we say, interesting.

“I have no idea how sending things to space is cheaper than building them on the ground, but [I] have also never built a data center,” one space company executive said this week via text when asked for his stance on space data centers.

Still, Musk and others seem very confident that they are inevitable. The reason they most commonly cite is the free, uninterrupted solar power and cooling that space provides, which could theoretically make the operational costs of a space data center much lower than on Earth. Also, it’s getting cheaper to transport objects into space.

Currently, the cheapest way to lob something into orbit is on board SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, at a cost of about $1,500 per kilogram, according to estimates from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That figure has fallen dramatically from past decades on an inflation-adjusted basis, thanks to the reusability of SpaceX’s rockets.

Launch costs are likely to fall even further, which could make the expense of transporting loads of GPUs and solar arrays into orbit more economically viable. By some estimates, the cost of launching payloads into orbit aboard Starship, SpaceX’s gargantuan new rocket, could drop to as low as $100 per kilogram in a few years. SpaceX still has a lot of kinks to iron out with that rocket, though.

Competition from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and other rocket startups could further drive down launch costs. Blue Origin successfully delivered payloads into space last month on New Glenn, its new reusable rocket, and it has a team working on space data centers, according to a person with knowledge of the matter (The Wall Street Journal previously reported on the effort).

“My estimate is that the cost-effectiveness of AI in space will be overwhelmingly better than AI on the ground,” Musk said last month at a conference.

‘At the end of the day, people don’t want these data centers in their backyards.’

Think about that for a minute. If Musk is sincere, his statement says a lot about the costs and obstacles to building data centers on Earth—or at least in the U.S. and other Western nations—not just the benefits of and falling barriers to shooting them into space.

In the U.S., one of the biggest impediments to building data centers is the surging demand for electricity. In a recent report, Morgan Stanley said U.S. data centers could fall 20% short of the power they need over the next several years as a result of exploding AI growth. The Department of Energy has warned that without meaningful new sources of power, a mismatch in electricity supply and data center–led demand could lead to many more blackouts by 2030. (China, in contrast, is bursting with cheap electricity, deepening fears in the U.S. that its biggest AI rival has the upper hand.)

And then there’s the grassroots AI backlash percolating in some communities, including those who worry the facilities will spike their electricity bills, divert their water and blight their landscapes. A report earlier this year from Data Center Watch, a research project run by AI intelligence company 10a Labs , found that bipartisan opponents have blocked or delayed $64 billion in U.S. data center projects.

Space data centers, in theory, can sidestep those hassles through what Baiju Bhatt, a co-founder of Robinhood, calls “infrastructure bypass.” Bhatt is now CEO of Aetherflux, a startup that announced plans this week to launch its first orbital data center satellite in 2027. He says data centers can take years to build in the U.S., between permitting, construction and securing of power to meet the facility’s needs. And then there are the NIMBY-related delays.

“At the end of the day, people don’t want these data centers in their backyards,” said Bhatt. “We need to find an alternative to building so many power plants in places [where] people live.”

EngineAI robot delivers forceful Bruce Lee-style kicks, while Musk’s Optimus jogs a few steps and falls over while handing out water bottle

The odds seemed impossible: a shoestring Chinese start-up founded in 2023 with just 1 million yuan (US$142,000) taking on Elon Musk – tech legend, disrupter in space and CEO of Tesla – who is valued at half a trillion dollars.

But in less than two years, EngineAI Robotics, led by CEO Zhao Tongyang, created the T800 – a robot that delivers Bruce Lee-style roundhouse kicks with the force of a small car – and, under the instruction of smiling engineers and scientists, tried it first on the boss himself.

That is why when Musk’s Optimus recently “set a personal record” by jogging a few steps, Chinese web users shrugged and laughed. The scepticism deepened when, during a live demo, Optimus fell backwards while trying to hand over a water bottle.

EngineAI launched its first model, the SA01, last year. Its T800, which boasts 450 Newton metres of peak torque, humanlike dexterity, and a solid-state battery enabling four to five hours of intense operation, will be ready for mass production by 2026.

Backed by China’s vast engineering talent pool and the Pearl River Delta’s plug-and-play supply chains, start-ups like EngineAI are turning sci-fi into reality at breakneck speed.

While American robots remain mostly in labs, Chinese firms are field-testing theirs across stadiums, factories and martial arts arenas in an industrial revolution fuelled by scale, speed and system.

Tesla’s Optimus team released a four-second video on platform X last Wednesday showing its humanoid robot “Optimus” running, claiming it had set a new “personal record”.

However, many Chinese viewers responded bluntly, stating that “it seems unremarkable” or “there have been too many similar products before this”.

When it comes to humanoid robots, Chinese audiences have grown accustomed to a dazzling array of promotional claims.

Numerous Chinese robotics companies have long mastered running gaits for their robots, even breaking into public awareness through topics like robot marathons and robot sports competitions.

More recently, the focus has shifted towards more complex movements such as dancing and martial arts – for example, the roundhouse kick performed by EngineAI’s T800.

Some viewers defended Optimus, arguing that “Kung fu moves are preprogrammed, which is very different from AI acting autonomously and adapting on the fly.”

But whether Optimus possessed true autonomous capability soon faced more direct scepticism.

During a demonstration titled “Autonomy Visualised” in Miami on December 8, Optimus lost its balance and fell backwards while trying to hand a bottle of water to an audience member.

The way it collapsed however, closely resembled the movements of a human operator removing a VR headset, fuelling suspicions that it was remotely controlled rather than operating autonomously.

The incident drew relentless mockery online. One user quipped, “Musk estimated Optimus would cost around 20,000 US dollars – does that include the necessary remote operator and supporting equipment, or are those extra?”

Such questions touch on a core issue: if even a basic task like handing over a bottle requires real-time human teleoperation, Optimus still has a long way to go before realising Musk’s vision of a general-purpose robot.

In contrast, robotics companies rooted in China’s manufacturing ecosystems are advancing rapidly, leveraging supply chain advantages and the country’s deep engineering talent pool.

EngineAI Robotics, one of the main players in the industry, started on a shoestring budget.

“When the company launched in 2023, its total start-up capital – including help from friends – was only between one and two million yuan,” founder Zhao Tongyang said in an interview in February.

Despite having only enough resources to hire junior engineers, the company insisted on developing both its hardware and software entirely in-house.

At the time, Tesla’s Optimus was already capable of visual-based object classification, enjoyed far greater research and development funding and commanded global attention.

EngineAI’s first product was the bipedal robot SA01, which entered the market at an industry-low price of 38,500 yuan in 2024.

Zhao attributed the cost control to the complete supply chain and strong manufacturing capabilities of China’s Pearl River Delta region.

“We designed core components and placed orders directly with factories, significantly reducing procurement costs,” he said.

Earlier this month, EngineAI released its new-generation humanoid robot, the T800, whose peak torque of 450 N·m exceeds many household car engines, and features humanlike hands capable of picking up a light bulb.

Powered by a high-performance solid-state battery, its overall physical performance surpasses that of 90 per cent of adult males, giving it genuine productivity attributes, at a starting price of 180,000 yuan.

Launching the T800, EngineAI also announced it had entered commercial mass production, with small-batch deliveries expected to start next year.

The company has its own production line in Shenzhen and also plans to build a global manufacturing centre in Zhengzhou, Henan province, capitalising on the collaborative efficiency and rapid responsiveness of domestic supply chains.

This tight integration from design to manufacturing speeds up development and cuts costs.

In contrast, during a shareholders’ meeting on November 6, Musk said that the Optimus production line would launch next year, with an estimated price tag of US$20,000 to US$30,000.

While Tesla still holds advantages in brand power, funding and AI expertise, Chinese teams have a clear edge in getting robots built quickly and affordably.

Industry analysts note that China’s robotics companies benefit from a strong supply chain and plenty of engineers. This lets them develop and launch products faster and cheaper.

“China’s strong industrial base formed through previous accumulation provides a reliable supply chain, while its deep pool of AI and robotics talent gives the country key advantages in developing humanoid robots,” Wu Yiming, a researcher at the Xian Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told state-run Guangming Daily.

Beyond industrial and supply chain advantages, China also benefits from diverse application scenarios and strong market demand.

“Rich industrial activities have accumulated multi-industry data, providing a broad testing ground, data foundation and market space for the development of humanoid robots,” Xu Man, a senior engineer at the Chinese Institute of Electronics, told the paper.

There will be, no doubt, many occupations that we can’t even imagine today. But here are four that seem possible.

A lot of people are scared about the future of AI.

Artificial-intelligence technology is going to transform how we live and work, in ways we can’t begin to imagine today. That means, yes, it will make some jobs obsolete. And it is going to transform all of our jobs, sometimes leaving today’s workers struggling to keep up.

But AI is also going to create opportunities—whole new jobs that center on the technology and the advances it enables. Speculating about which jobs may be in our AI future is difficult; there will be no doubt many jobs that we can’t imagine today. But predicting is still a worthy exercise. To that end, here is a look at four possible jobs that AI may create in the years ahead.

AI systems can be inscrutable. We all have experienced when they churn out unexpected answers that even their designers can’t fully explain—or sometimes just make stuff up.

But it also can be tough to understand the basics of how AI fits into individual organizations and jobs, things as basic as: Who makes sure the systems are kept up-to-date and functioning properly? Stakeholders will need those answers as AI takes on more responsibility for tasks like judging loan applications, recommending medical treatments and accepting or rejecting résumés.

Enter the AI explainer, an expert who understands the technology deeply and can translate it into plain language for managers, judges, regulators and others. Imagine a lawsuit involving a traffic accident—an autonomous city bus hits a privately owned self-driving vehicle. A judge and jury will need to have some level of understanding about how the technology works: Were both vehicles’ software up-to-date? If not, is it the owner’s fault—or perhaps the bus maker or software provider?

The parties involved in the case might all hire their own AI explainers to give expert testimony—and, inevitably, put their own side’s spin on the information.

The different varieties of AI can also be baffling to newcomers. Companies are going to face confusing decisions about which type of tech works best for different tasks—and getting the answers right will be crucial. An AI chooser will help clear up the confusion. This expert will help companies sort through the variety of AI systems available and figure out what jobs they are each best suited to handle. Then the chooser will guide the company through the process of buying and installing the tech.

Imagine a retailer that wants AI to take on a whole range of tasks. The expert might make the case that predictive AI—which can analyze data to figure out trends and tendencies—could figure out what customers want based on their buying history. If the retailer wanted help in developing marketing materials, the expert might recommend generative AI, which can take data and implement it in creative ways.

We already see companies struggling to handle issues like bias in AI decisions. Auditors and cleaners would work hand in hand to spot and resolve those types of problems. The AI auditor, for instance, would perform regular checkups—weekly, monthly or even daily, depending on the industry—to see if the AI systems produced results that were unfairly skewed in some direction. The cleaner would adjust the system to eliminate those problems, such as training it with a new set of data that helps eliminate its bias.

As AI works its way further into people’s jobs, workers are going to need lots of training in the new technology. And we will get a new type of training to meet that demand. Unlike conventional corporate teaching, which relies on in-person sessions or generic online courses, a new breed of training specialist will leverage AI itself to upskill workers. The trainer would use the technology to figure out what teaching style works best for individuals and tailor the lessons to fit. This could be especially valuable for midcareer workers who need to rapidly acquire new skills without returning to formal education, or for workers in smaller companies that lack the resources for extensive training programs.

But these jobs are just the beginning. AI will create countless other new roles, in industries that don’t even exist yet. The future will certainly bring a lot of uncertainty—but a lot of opportunity as well.

Key Points

• Ellisons short of cash: Larry Ellison is funding only a small portion; Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds are supplying most of the money.
• Hostile bid vs Netflix: Paramount Skydance claims its all-cash offer is safer and undervalues WBD’s cable assets less than the Netflix deal.
• Political & control concerns: Gulf funding raises scrutiny over foreign influence, but investors focus on cash and WBD stock is soaring.