The mecca for China’s boom in artificial intelligence (AI) is Liangzhu, a leafy suburb of Hangzhou, the tech-heavy capital of Zhejiang province. The Communist Party has long touted Liangzhu’s famous archaeological remains, dating back to 3300BC, as proof of the age of Chinese civilisation.

Now Liangzhu, with its myriad AI  start-ups , represents the future. Investors from all over China flock there to meet growing numbers of founders, app engineers and other AI developers and dreamers. It is six months since a barely known AI start-up, DeepSeek,

by releasing an impressive open-source model trained for a sliver of the cost of fancier Western ones.