Tag: china-bci

3 articles

Market Moves

Tencent takes a minority stake in Hangzhou brain-chip developer Nanochap Electronics

Tencent Holdings has acquired a minority equity stake in Nanochap Electronics, a Hangzhou-based fabless semiconductor company specialising in neural interface and biosensing SoCs for brain-computer interface and medical device applications. The investment was disclosed through a 28 May 2026 business registration filing showing Shanghai Qishan Investment, a Tencent subsidiary, added as a new shareholder. Nanochap's registered capital increased to RMB 16.8853 million. Exact stake size and investment amount have not been publicly disclosed. The move follows the April 2026 StairMed funding round in which Alibaba led and Tencent joined, and signals a sustained pattern of Chinese big-tech equity participation in the country's BCI silicon supply chain.

May 29

Industry News

NeuroXess says its Mandarin-decoding brain implant runs at 300 characters a minute, faster than native speech

Shanghai-based NeuroXess says a 35-year-old woman with epilepsy fitted with its 256-channel surface-cortex implant has been decoded reading Mandarin at 300 characters per minute through a large language model layer, faster than the roughly 220 cpm rate of a native Mandarin first-language speaker. Co-founder and chief scientist Tiger Tao disclosed the figure to Nature on 19 May 2026. The underlying paper has not yet been published, but the result sits on top of NeuroXess's already peer-reviewed Science Advances paper from 5 November 2025 (71.2% accuracy across 394 Mandarin syllables in a 43-year-old woman with epilepsy).

May 28