If you’ve never been to Shenzhen, China’s electronics capital, the annual CES trade show in Las Vegas is the next best thing. I’m reporting this week from the sprawling event, surrounded by fancy, strange, and often unnecessary gadgets, and despite my sore legs, I’ve barely scratched the surface.

There are at least 900 Chinese tech companies attending CES this year, almost a quarter of the total exhibitors, according to an analysis of the conference’s exhibitor directory. I even saw two Chinese humanoid robots at different booths dancing to the same viral Chinese rap song five minutes apart.

But at CES, Chinese companies are showing off far more than just gadgets; also on display are artificial intelligence software, electric vehicles, self-driving technology, and more. Today, I’m sharing the four most important trends I’ve seen at CES, from the rise of Chinese smart glasses to the quiet adoption of generative AI video tools.

Seeing Is Believing

Meta has sold over 2 million pairs of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, but the tech giant just announced it’s delaying their global rollout. Chinese AI companies, meanwhile, are taking the product category into overdrive. At CES, there are at least three dozen Chinese AI eyewear products on display this year.

One of the most promising brands in this space is Rokid, a Hangzhou-based company that has been making VR and AR glasses since 2018. AR glasses are particularly promising, because they are one of the least invasive gadgets to wear for long periods of time, says Zoro Shao, Rokid’s global general manager. Shao says the ideal pair should weigh less than 50 grams, have full-color display, need to be charged only once a day, and retail for less than $500.

But Shao says smart glasses are still fairly niche, and mass adoption remains far away. “Chinese electric vehicles became unstoppable once they accounted for 5 percent of the total car market in China; now they’re almost 50 percent of the market,” Shao says. Cumulative sales of Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, in contrast, represent less than 1 percent of the US population.

I tried out Rokid’s flagship glasses, which project a tiny screen in the center of your field of vision that can display GPS directions, AI chatbot conversations, language translations, and a teleprompter. For now, everything is displayed in a single color—green. I was impressed how the glasses could be adapted to my eyesight (I’m quite nearsighted, and smart goggles are usually a pain for me to try). You can insert a pair of prescription lenses into Rokid’s glasses, a process that only took a few seconds. They also have a real-time translation tool, which records the other speaker’s voice, runs it through AI models from Alibaba or Microsoft, and then presents the translation in real time on the same tiny screen. It worked surprisingly well when I tested it, but it’s still awkward to be reading text on a screen when there’s a human standing there talking directly to you.

Speaking of Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant was also at CES showing off its own new smart glasses, which were released in November. But it had a tiny booth on the edge of one exhibition hall, and the only employee who had the glasses wasn’t there when I arrived. Alibaba declined to tell me how well the glasses are selling, but a company representative says it plans to offer them outside of China soon.

I also spoke with a Chinese company called Appotronics, which makes the tiny laser projectors that enable on-lens displays in smart glasses. The smallest model they showed me is about the size of a Lego brick, can display full color on the lenses, and is inexpensive to manufacture.

For Chinese companies, the bet is that lower prices and more AI features will persuade people to wear smart glasses all day, recording their lives through constant video and audio. If you lower the price to around $200, “people will start to use them every day,” says Brian Chen, general manager of Appotronics’ innovation center. That shift would raise obvious privacy and security concerns that both Rokid and Appotronics have acknowledged, but they see the potential payoff as worth the risk.

From Vacuums to Cars

Several major Chinese electric vehicle companies, including Geely and Great Wall Motor, brought their cars to CES, but what stole the show were two brands that almost no one had heard of before. Nebula Next and Kosmera both showed off sleek, luxurious electric sports car prototypes, neither of which are available on the market yet. Both brands have connections to Dreame, a leading Chinese robot vacuum company, but they claim to operate independently from it. At CES, however, the Nebula Next and Kosmera booths were tied to Dreame in the conference’s directory.

Putting aside this complicated corporate relationship, the idea of a robot vacuum company investing in EVs is not as absurd as it sounds. If anything, it’s just the latest example of how Chinese electronics companies are parlaying their existing manufacturing expertise into making cars. The founder of Roborock, another Chinese vacuum company, started an EV company in 2023. Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone and home device giant, launched its first EV in 2024.

Dreame isn’t the first and won’t be the last Chinese company crossing over from electronics to EVs, says Lei Xing, an independent car market analyst and the former chief editor of the China Auto Review, who checked out Kosmera’s prototypes at CES with me. China’s sophisticated supply chain, engineering talent, and manufacturing ecosystem make it relatively easy for newcomers to take a shot at building cars, Xing explains, but only a few will succeed. Others could end up more like Apple, whose long-running car project ultimately collapsed. “Life and death will be a natural outcome,” Xing says.

Robovans Are Coming

When I went back to China last year, I made sure to try Baidu’s robotaxi service, which is roughly on par with Alphabet’s Waymo in the US. What surprised me in China, however, was how many autonomous parcel delivery cars there were roaming the same open streets alongside my robotaxi.

Neolix is the leading company in China making both the hardware and software for robovans. It says the number of them deployed in China is growing roughly tenfold each year and reached about 10,000 in 2025. (For comparison, there’re about 2,500 Waymo cars operating in the US.) Neolix claims to represent more than 60 percent of the market and has no major competitors globally, says Zhao You, the company’s executive president. Neolix brought three of its cars to CES, ranging in size from a mini-fridge to a golf cart: tiny, windowless boxes perched on oversized wheels, with no driver inside.

Neolix is eager to expand internationally and already has pilot projects underway in the Middle East, East Asia, and Latin America. It’s eyeing the American market too. Zhao told me he’s aware that any self-driving company in the US will face heavy scrutiny on issues like safety and data security, but he’s hoping to work with local partners who could help navigate compliance requirements here. “As a tech company, working with one cloud service provider for any market is the most affordable option, but it won’t work. You have to talk to local regulators and learn which cloud providers they approve of,” Zhao says.

Generating Viral Videos

When OpenAI launched Sora 2 last year, it was making an ambitious bet that generative AI can be not just a tool but a content genre big enough to sustain an entire social media platform. That vision hasn’t fully materialized yet, but at CES I met with two AI video companies that are competing with OpenAI’s Sora.

Kling is the AI division of Kuaishou, a massively popular Chinese short-video platform. The Kling app and website combined have more than 60 million registered users, the majority of which the company says are based outside China. About 100 people attended Kling’s panel event at CES with the platform’s power users. Jason Zada, an award-winning director who made Coca-Cola’s controversial 2024 AI-generated holiday commercial, said he recently used Kling to generate a YouTube video featuring a fireplace calmly burning as Santa, turkeys, astronauts, and snowmen make inexplicable appearances. Zada said he created over 600 clips with Kling and pieced them together to make the final 105-minute video. It cost about $2,500 in token credits.

Kling wants to be a tool both for amateur creators and Hollywood professionals, says Zeng Yushen, Kling’s head of global operations and marketing. The generative AI technologies today may not be ready for full feature films yet, but they are totally capable of making mobile video ads and some TV commercials. And the next milestone would be making AI vertical dramas, Zeng says.

PixVerse, a Singapore-based company with Chinese founders and investors, says it’s not giving up on the idea of making an AI video social media platform. The PixVerse app has more than 120 million registered users and over 15 million monthly active users, nearly all of which are based outside China in countries like the United States, Brazil, Russia, and India, says Jaden Xie, cofounder of the company.

The history of the Chinese internet suggests that generative AI tools can evolve into full-fledged platforms, Xie argues. Kuaishou began as a simple GIF maker, while Musical.ly—the precursor to TikTok—started as a lip-sync app. By contrast, he says, OpenAI’s Sora 2 aimed for social features before the quality of the content was good enough. Xie plans to move more cautiously. Rather than endless scrolling, he imagines a next-generation video platform where users can, say, click directly on elements within a video to change or replace them, generating new mashups in real time.

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.