Kevin Xu

Topics: VC• China• Geopolitics•

“Hardtech” Corporate VCs Rising in China

Huawei runs a little-known corporate VC division called Habo Investment. I first wrote about Habo back in early 2021, when it was barely two years old. Yet, at that time, it had already made 22 investments, five of which have gone public on the

Topics: Investing•

Q1 2023: Performance Update

Back in January, I published our first Interconnected Annual Letter to share the Interconnected public market portfolio performance in 2022 and my learning along the way. Even though I don’t manage anyone else’s money but my own, writing the letter was a

Topics: TikTok• ByteDance• China•

RESTRICT First, Ban Later

Since my first post on the RESTRICT Act two weeks ago, the bill has gotten a lot more attention and scrutiny than when it was first announced on March 7. And deservedly so. Its definition of what types of technologies may constitute national security

Topics: Alibaba•

Alibaba Reorg

If you work in tech long enough, you will experience many company reorgs. They are almost as routine as sales kickoffs or quarterly earnings calls. But every once in a while, a consequential company does a reorg so major and out of the box

Topics: Regulation• China•

RESTRICT China

From time to time, I like to read the full text of a legislative bill, if only to put my past work experience at the White House and my law degree to some good use. What caught my attention recently was the RESTRICT Act,

Topics: Cloud Industry• JD• National Champion•

Is JD Cloud the New “National Champion”?

JD Cloud is quietly, but effectively, positioning itself as the new “national champion” in China’s cloud computing market. This move became apparent when, during the weeklong “Two Meetings” deliberation that anointed China’s leaders of the next five years, JD Cloud’s top

Topics: Meta• Open Source• AI•

Is Meta Becoming a Trustworthy AI Company?

Among all the Big Tech companies who are planting flags in the red hot generative AI arms race, I think the most trustworthy one may actually be Meta. Yep, Zuck’s Meta. I say this because its recently released large language model (LLM), LLaMA

Topics: EVs• Ford• Geopolitics•

Ford Hearts CATL: America's Awkward Battery Deficiency

Deglobalization may be the megatrend of this decade, but it unfolds differently depending on the sector, technology, relative cost, and which country has the most leverage and most friends. In the US-China context, the United States appears to have more leverage over China in

Topics: ByteDance• Data Regulation•

Are Americans Worried About Chinese Apps?

Not really. Actually, not at all. If you look at the top three free apps on the Apple App Store, they are Temu (by Pinduoduo), CapCut, and TikTok (both by ByteDance). If you happen to be an Android person, the top three free apps

Topics: AI• Baidu• Cloud Industry•

Will ChatGPT Make Baidu Relevant Again?

ChatGPT has set off an AI arms race – and this arms race is global. Even though the seemingly ubiquitous chatbot is blocked in China, Baidu is set to release its own ChatGPT-like bot in March. Most of the reporting so far, in both English

Topics: Delisting• IPO• Stock Market•

Reflections on the Delisting Saga

In the last three years, the threat of forced delisting for Chinese companies publicly traded in the US was constant. Billions of market cap evaporated while the investment world waited to see if the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (or PCAOB or the auditor

Topics: Deglobalization• TSMC• Semiconductor•

How Much Does Deglobalization Cost?

When TSMC’s Arizona fab held its “tool-in” ceremony to much fanfare last December, its founder, Morris Chang, sagely framed the event as simply the “end of the beginning [https://interconnect.substack.com/p/globalization-is-dead-and-no-one].” This “end” not only marks the end of the

Topics: Annual Letter• Semiconductor• Investing•

Interconnected Annual Letter 2022

As we shake off the holiday-induced “mental cobwebs'' and embrace a new year, I’m starting a new ritual – the Interconnected Annual Letter. Admittedly, this is a shameless mimicry of the ritual behind Warren Buffett’s famed Berkshire Hathaway annual letters, as

Topics: TSMC• Semiconductor• Morris Chang•

Globalization is Dead and No One is Listening

The “tool-in” ceremony of TSMC’s new fab in Arizona drew a lot of attention last week. CEOs from Apple, Nvidia, and AMD attended and spoke. President Biden, along with a coterie of cabinet officials, congresspeople, and local Arizona politicians, came to rally, celebrate,

Topics: GPT• AI•

ChatGPT and the Future of Domain Expertise

(Disclosure: this post is *not* written by AI.) With DALL·E, ChatGPT, and the overall hype around “generative AI”, every newsletter post on the Internet should probably start disclosing whether it is written by AI or not. I figured I might as well start

Topics: COVID-19• Apple•

Covid Zero and Its Ironies

It is hard to talk about China’s Covid Zero Policy in a multidimensional way. The policy is often cast in binary terms – either the reason why millions of lives are saved or the reason why millions of lives and billions of economic output

Topics: Developer• Open Source•

Are the Next 50 Million Developers Already Here?

Every year GitHub publishes a “State of the Octoverse [https://octoverse.github.com/]” report to share insights on the state of open source software and developer ecosystem at large. Every year for the last two years, I’ve written a post to share my

Topics: Twitter• Elon Musk• Open Source•

Elon's Twitter and Open Source Algorithm

By now, the entire world knows that Elon Musk owns Twitter. The ongoing frenzy surrounding this deal has reached peak “silly season [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/silly%20season]” – a term political campaign operatives use to describe ridiculous and frivolous media stories near the

Topics: South Korea• Data Center• Data Regulation•

Kakao, Data Center Fire, the Data Residency Dilemma

I used to work at an open source distributed database startup called PingCAP. As the exec driving the company’s global market expansion effort, I talked to a lot of cloud architects and distributed systems engineers (as potential customers) about how a distributed database

Topics: EVs• CALB• Tesla•

CALB vs CATL: Can Two Battery Pigs Both Fly?

In the Chinese startup ecosystem, no advice is more viral than this line: “if you stand where the wind blows, even a pig can fly. [https://36kr.com/p/1722924990465]” It was coined by Lei Jun, the founder and CEO of Xiaomi, chairman of

Topics: Hong Kong• IPO•

Is Hong Kong’s IPO Window Opening Up?

The IPO market has been frozen not just on Wall Street, but around the world, especially for new, emerging companies. So much so that the only IPO that has been grabbing attention is Volkswagen’s spin-out IPO of Porsche [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/

Topics: Alibaba• Jack Ma•

Alibaba: Is It a “Mature” Company?

I still vividly remember the last time I visited Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou. It was the summer of 2016. I was in town for the G20 Summit and happened to have another unrelated meeting with one of Alibaba’s original co-founders, who functioned

Topics: Tencent• VC• Prosus•

Prosus: Softbank Without the Drama

“What is the single best technology investment of all time?” An often-heard answer to this question is Softbank’s early investment in Alibaba. Indeed, Masa Son’s storied $20 million bet on Jack Ma (with his strong, shiny eyes) in 2000 has yielded Softbank

Topics: Industrial Planning• Semiconductor• China•

US vs China: How Can America Win?

The technology competition between the US and China is often framed as a race where China is trying to catch up, while the US is trying to maintain its lead by using tools, like export control, to keep China behind. For the first time

Topics: Cloud Industry•

How to Invest in China's Cloud

A couple of weeks ago, we published a detailed breakdown of China’s cloud industry’s current state of development [https://interconnected.blog/how-is-chinas-cloud-industry-doing/], which resonated with many industry analysts and technologists. We combed through the official whitepaper published by the government-affiliated think tank,