Live from CIIF: What We Saw on the Ground With Yunqi Partners at the 2026 Expo

The 26th China International Industry Fair recently concluded in Shanghai. This year's event, themed "Intelligent Economy, Boundless Smart Manufacturing," covered 310,000 square meters of exhibition space and brought together over 3,200 companies. Six Yunqi portfolio companies — JD.com Industrial, HeTan Intelligence, NovaFusion, Honghu Future Energy, LightStandard, and Landau Suiyan — also showcased their latest products and technological achievements.

In this edition of "Yunqi Partners," we highlight select developments from the industry fair and the latest progress of these six companies, organized across three industrial directions.

Yunqi Observations

Industrial AI: More Technologies Entering Concrete Application Scenarios

In the intelligent manufacturing and robotics exhibition zones, specific application scenarios such as industrial assembly, material sorting, and laboratory operations were the main focus. Beyond movement and manipulation capabilities, robots are increasingly demonstrating complex task execution, human-robot collaboration, and continuous operation abilities.

Industrial AI applications are also extending into production workflows and enterprise management. From production scheduling, quality inspection, and equipment maintenance to industrial procurement and supply chain management, more and more scenarios are exploring AI's application value.

For manufacturing enterprises, whether technology can operate stably, deploy easily, and deliver quantifiable efficiency gains remains the key determinant of its practical value.

Fusion Energy: Multiple Technical Routes Advancing Engineering Validation

This year's Industry Fair featured a concentrated display of fusion energy technologies in the smart energy zone, covering device models, high-temperature superconducting magnets, and related core equipment.

Different technical routes — tokamak, stellarator, and field-reversed configuration — are continuing R&D and validation around their respective engineering challenges.

As related projects advance, the importance of engineering capabilities in magnet manufacturing, precision machining, device integration, and stable operation has become more pronounced. Commercial power generation remains a long development cycle away, but sustained breakthroughs at the component and device levels will accumulate foundational experience for subsequent technical validation.

Semiconductors and Optical Computing: Key Technologies Extending Upstream

For the first time, this year's Industry Fair established a dedicated integrated circuit exhibition zone, covering chip design, wafer fabrication, packaging and testing, equipment, materials, and core components.

The key equipment and components required for advanced process nodes remain a focal point of sustained industry effort. Meanwhile, as AI computing demand grows, novel computing architectures such as optical computing are exploring new paths to improve performance and energy efficiency.

From materials and key devices to system integration, semiconductor technology innovation spans multiple links. Whether R&D outcomes can advance further toward engineering validation, productization, and scaled delivery merits continued attention.

Six Portfolio Companies on the Ground

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JD.com Industrial | Industrial World Model Released, Expanding AI Boundaries

At this year's Industry Fair, JD.com Industrial fully unveiled its "AI-Driven Panoramic View of the Full Industrial Chain" for the first time and released its Industrial World Model.

The model focuses on scenarios including production manufacturing, equipment maintenance, logistics circulation, and quality inspection, exploring capabilities for state understanding, dynamic inference, and risk prediction in industrial environments.

For example, in workshop and warehouse transfer areas, the model can combine spatial structure, vehicle movement trajectories, and personnel behavior to identify potential collision risks in advance, and intervene through alerts or coordinated equipment deceleration.

During the exhibition, JD.com Industrial also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with AMD to jointly develop AI terminal products for industrial environments, focusing on industrial vision, equipment maintenance, and production safety.

For small and medium manufacturing enterprises, the company launched AI Smart Procurement Manager, with core features permanently free of charge, covering procurement demand analysis, product selection and purchasing, and supply chain delivery. According to company disclosures, this application can help SMEs improve procurement transactional efficiency by over 70% and reduce product selection time by over 60%.

Additionally, JD.com Industrial's "Gongpin Zhilian" intelligent production and capability open platform for industrial supply chain product data won the 2026 CIIF Grand Award, while AI Smart Procurement Manager received the CIIF Digital Intelligence Technology Award.

HeTan Intelligence | Physical AI Scientist Talos Makes Its Debut

Lead Series A investor project HeTan Intelligence showcased "Physical AI Scientist" Talos at this year's Industry Fair — a general-purpose dual-arm mobile robot capable of completing complex operations in real laboratory environments.

On site, Talos demonstrated small-molecule purification experiments, including understanding experimental tasks, operating traditional laboratory equipment, and performing real-time reasoning and error correction during continuous operations.

HeTan Intelligence adopts a "hardware standardization, software-defined capabilities" technical approach. Through self-developed sensors and VLA (Vision-Language-Action) architecture, the robot can use existing laboratory instruments, reducing the need for automation retrofitting.

According to public reports, Talos has previously completed 50 consecutive days of trial operation, purifying over 50 drug molecule intermediates with more than 8,000 physical operations executed at zero error at the execution level.

On the commercialization front, in September 2026, HeTan Intelligence signed a strategic agreement with Danaher and secured order cooperation. The two parties will jointly build an AI robotics intelligent laboratory, with the collaboration incorporated into the Danaher Beacon scientific research partnership program.

NovaFusion | Exploring Modular Fusion Energy

Angel-round portfolio company NovaFusion exhibited a scaled model of its first-generation device "Nova-1" in the smart energy zone.

The company focuses on commercializing Field-Reversed Configuration Small Modular Reactors (FRC-SMR), aiming to provide high-density, stable, low-carbon energy solutions for high-power-consumption scenarios such as AI data centers.

According to company plans, its modular fusion reactor design targets a single-reactor output of 50 MWe, with a footprint of less than half a football field, and a long-term levelized cost of electricity target of approximately 1 cent per kWh.

Currently, "Nova-1" at Lingang, Shanghai is undergoing integrated assembly, advancing toward key milestones including first plasma discharge and hundred-million-degree plasma temperatures. According to the company, breakthroughs have been achieved in all four core components, with domestic production realized.

During the exhibition, NovaFusion founder Dr. Houyang Guo delivered a speech titled "Illuminating Infinite Computing Power with Fusion Light," sharing perspectives on fusion technology's application prospects in future computing infrastructure.

Honghu Future Energy | Focusing on High-Temperature Superconducting Stellarator

Yunqi-SJTU AI Angel Fund project Honghu Future Energy focuses on high-temperature superconducting stellarator technology, conducting technical R&D around magnetic field configuration design optimization, 3D high-temperature superconducting magnet development, and advanced device integration.

At this exhibition, the company showcased important engineering progress on its core project "Honghu Zhiyuan-1."

Leveraging collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University-related research institutions, the team has completed the world's first full-scale high-temperature superconducting stellarator magnet, achieving breakthroughs in precision manufacturing of complex non-standard magnets.

On opening day, the related stellarator engineering magnet coils received the CIIF Innovation Leadership Award.

Compared to other fusion routes, stellarators possess theoretical advantages in steady-state operation, while simultaneously imposing high demands on the design and manufacturing of complex 3D coils. The development of full-scale magnets represents an important step in advancing related technology toward device engineering validation.

According to company plans, "Honghu Zhiyuan-1" is scheduled for completion in 2028, with power generation demonstration capability targeted for 2030, further validating plant-level operations, maintenance, and economic models.

LightStandard | Exploring More Energy-Efficient AI Computing

Lead angel-round investor project LightStandard brought two core achievements to the National Chip Exhibition: a 256×256 optical computing chip and a glass-substrate optical computing chip.

The 256×256 optical computing chip integrates storage and computation within the same optical path, enabling AI model parameters to be stored directly inside the chip and reducing frequent data movement between storage and compute units.

According to the company, it has currently integrated over 65,000 optical computing units on a single die, with subsequent R&D plans to further increase this to the million-unit scale.

The glass-substrate optical computing chip employs glass substrate and nanoimprint processes, exploring ways to overcome traditional lithography's limitations on chip area and reduce manufacturing costs.

Based on disclosed technical metrics, the related solution has the potential to achieve thousand-POPS-level computing power per glass body, and hundred-fold energy efficiency improvements compared to traditional AI computing products.

Beyond ground-based computing applications, LightStandard is also collaborating with computing satellite developers to explore optical computing applications in space computing scenarios.

The company states it has completed scaled delivery of over 10 optical computing systems.

Landau Suiyan | Domestic EUV Light Source System Prototype Debuts

At the Innovation & Technology Pavilion, early-stage portfolio company Landau Suiyan publicly displayed its Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) light source system prototype for the first time.

EUV light sources are one of the core technologies for advanced process lithography systems, involving high-power lasers, plasma physics, precision optics, and complex system integration across multiple domains.

Founded in 2024, Landau Suiyan builds on R&D results from Tsinghua University's Gas Discharge Plasma Laboratory, focusing on Laser-Produced Plasma (LPP-EUV) source technology.

The light source system displayed this time adopts the LPP-EUV technical route, consistent with the technology path of internationally mainstream advanced lithography light sources.

According to on-site staff, the exhibited light source system achieves a 90% domestic production rate, with the vast majority of core components independently developed. It is currently available for technical validation including chip exposure testing.

The company's disclosed product progress includes proof-of-concept verification for high-power light source systems, as well as productization R&D for low-power products.

EUV light sources impose extremely high requirements on output power, stability, and continuous operation capability. The company estimates that mass production for this light source system remains 3 to 5 years away, with subsequent focus on improving source power and long-term operational stability.

This prototype debut provides a new milestone achievement for domestic advanced process key technology development.

Closing Thoughts

From industrial AI entering concrete business scenarios, to fusion devices and key magnet engineering R&D, to continued iteration of optical computing chips and EUV light source prototypes, this year's Industry Fair presented multiple stages of different technologies progressing from R&D toward industrial application.

For frontier technology enterprises, beyond technical breakthroughs lie the long processes of productization, engineering validation, cost optimization, and commercialization.

Yunqi will continue to track these directions, accompanying more technological innovations as they advance toward practical application.