NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang gestures at the NVIDIA GTC Global AI Conference on March 17, 2026 in San Jose, California, USA.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
Chinese artificial intelligence stocks soared Wednesday on upbeat comments from China. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talks about the promise of AI agents and OpenClaw.
Huang said Tuesday that OpenClaw is “definitely the next ChatGPT,” calling it a transformative step to expand what users can accomplish with AI.
OpenClaw is an open source AI agent that is seeing increasing adoption in China, with many local technology companies integrating it into their products and releasing their own versions.
mini max and Knowledge Atlas TechnologyShares, also known as Zhipu, soared 22% and 14% respectively in Hong Kong. Both AI companies have been ramping up their agent AI offerings, recently rolling out tools built on OpenClaw.
Minimax and Zhipu are among China’s emerging “AI Tigers,” a group of companies building large-scale language models comparable to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Last month, Zhipu also announced GLM-5, an open source large-scale language model designed with more powerful coding capabilities and support for extended agent-based tasks. The company said its performance is close to Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in coding benchmarks and better than Google’s Gemini 3 Pro in some tests, but CNBC has not independently verified these claims.
Shares of SenseTime, which has pivoted from facial recognition surveillance to an AI software platform and recently integrated one of its AI assistants with OpenClaw, rose 2.43%. Shanghai-listed cloud computing company UCloud Technology rose 13%.
“China’s rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is strengthening its position as one of the world’s leading AI markets,” Moody’s said in a recent note.
However, adoption remains uneven across sectors, reflecting differing digital readiness and creating different credit implications. While major technology companies are driving the most advanced and financially meaningful AI integrations, consumer and industrial companies are adopting the technology more selectively to improve efficiency.
Other Asian tech stocks also rose after Hwang said he expected the order value between Blackwell and Vera Rubin to reach $1 trillion by 2027. SK Hynix rose nearly 9% and Samsung Electronics rose 7.53%.
