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- US Battery Startup Picks China 🔋 59% of Robot Installs 🤖 Eli Lilly’s $3.35B Deal 💊
US Battery Startup Picks China 🔋 59% of Robot Installs 🤖 Eli Lilly’s $3.35B Deal 💊
China Insights Weekly for September 28. Unpacking China’s economic and technological advances.
Tomas Kucera & Yereth Jansen
September 28, 2026
Welcome back to China Insights Weekly. Here are some of the key highlights for this week’s edition:
Open-weight AI reaches 78.4%, in a one-day Vercel gateway snapshot
Chinese car brands near 12% in Europe, with hybrids driving sales
Airbus expands Tianjin output, delivering the first jet from its second line
Foreign Yangtze cruise passengers rise 56.8%, as travel demand returns
🚀 Headlines
Open-weight models captured 78.4% of Vercel AI Gateway token volume on September 19, up from 27.5% on July 1, nearly tripling in under three months. Chinese models Moonshot AI and DeepSeek ranked third and fourth by estimated spend; combined with Z.ai, they exceeded OpenAI's share. The September production index, based on August traffic, found open-weight models processed 56% of tokens, up from 7% in December 2025, while accounting for 14% of spend. Adoption cut the gateway's average price per token by 23.2% in August. While the daily figure reflects one managed gateway's self-selected traffic, a similar trend appears across other platforms, including OpenRouter.
Eli Lilly has signed a research collaboration and licensing agreement with Beijing-based InnoCare Pharma potentially worth up to USD 3.35 billion. Lilly will pay up to USD 100 million in upfront and near-term milestone payments, plus about USD 3.25 billion in development and commercial milestones. InnoCare will also receive tiered single-digit royalties on annual net sales. The deal tasks InnoCare with discovering compounds against up to five novel targets using its proprietary drug-discovery platform. The agreement took effect on September 24, 2026.
EnerVenue, a US battery startup founded by Stanford professor Yi Cui, opened its first factory in Changzhou, China, on September 24, after scrapping a USD 264 million Kentucky plant that would have created 450 jobs. CEO Henning Rath cited Changzhou's industrial cluster of hydraulics, pneumatics and automation specialists, noting it would be "very difficult with the capital available" to prove commercial-scale manufacturing in the US. The 95%-automated facility costs USD 20–50 million, will employ about 400 workers by year-end, and targets 250 MWh capacity in 2026, rising to 1 GWh by Q3 2027. Graduate engineers earn roughly RMB 12,000 (USD 1,792) monthly. EnerVenue raised over USD 300 million in March, backed by Saudi Aramco and SLB.
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China employed 41% of the world's leading AI researchers last year, overtaking the United States at 34%, according to a Carnegie China study titled "Who's ahead in the global AI talent race." The shift marks a dramatic reversal from 2022, when America commanded 46% of top-tier AI talent against China's 27%. A growing number of elite Chinese researchers are opting to stay home to build careers, drawn by a booming domestic AI industry, while tighter US visa restrictions deter others. Silicon Valley no longer holds the unrivalled appeal it once did for China's best and brightest.
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