Xi'an Port stands witness to booming China-Central Asia trade

China

Xi'an Port stands witness to booming China-Central Asia trade

2025-06-14 17:28 Last Updated At：23:27

As a key transportation hub of the China-Europe railway freight service, the Xi'an International Port Station in the northwestern Chinese province of Shaanxi has stood witness to the growing trade relations between China and Central Asia countries.

During the harvest season every year, kiwi fruits fresh from the orchards across Yangling District in Xianyang City are being packaged at local warehouses, transported by lorries to the Xi'an Port, and shipped by cargo trains to Central Asia via the China-Europe Railway Express line.

Official data showed that in 2024, Shaanxi's agricultural product exports reached 6.59 billion yuan (about 920 million U.S. dollars), with kiwis, pears and apples ranking as the top three varieties of fruits in export value nationwide.

"The China-Europe Railway Express has cut fruit transportation time from 10 days to 7 and reduced costs by nearly a half," said Ren Jianshe, president of the Shaanxi Jinqiao Fruit Industry Co., Ltd, in a recent interview with the China Global Television Network (CGTN).

A student from Kyrgyzstan whose Chinese name is Fei Yang has been pursuing her studies at the Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in Shaanxi. During a recent tour of a local kiwi orchard in Xianyang, she witnessed how freshly picked kiwi fruits were processed and packaged before being moving on board freight trains linking Xi'an to Central Asian countries.

"The fruit production here is on a large scale, and the logistics are very efficient. After graduation, I hope to work in trade and help transport more high-quality Chinese products to my hometown through the China-Europe Railway Express," she told CGTN.

A newly opened rail terminal for freight between Xi'an and Kazakhstan plays a central role in bringing Shaanxi's fruits to the Kazakh market. The terminal, covering nearly 50 hectares in the Xi'an Port and mainly consisting of cargo warehouses and container storage areas, has been operational since February 2024.

And through the China-Europe Railway Express, the transportation time for fresh fruits has been cut from about 40 days to just 14 days.

"I believe that enhancing logistics infrastructure and boosting the capacity and efficiency of cross-border transport corridors are key to advancing trade between our two countries," said Seitzhanov Mukhamezhan, manager of the China-Kazakhstan (Xi'an) Trade and Logistics Co., Ltd.

Chinese companies upgrade inference computing technologies to meet AI demands

As demand for inference computing rises, Chinese companies are fighting through bottlenecks by upgrading technologies.

Lanxin Computing in south China's Shenzhen City has developed chips that can run large models on all-in-one AI computers.

"In inference computing, the key factor now is token-generation efficiency. With the rapid growth of AI agents, demand is surging across government services, healthcare, finance and other sectors. Our products are currently in short supply," said Xie Shengluo, co-founder of Lanxin Computing.

Electricity supply for chips is also facing pressure. In high-power applications at computing centers, conventional silicon-based solutions are increasingly challenged by energy losses and heat management.

Wan Yuxi, director of Shenzhen Pinghu Laboratory, leads a team that has developed a gallium nitride crystal film on an 8-inch silicon carbide substrate. It can substantially improve both efficiency and power-delivery capacity when used to charge GPUs.

"Previously, the efficiency of the silicon-based gallium nitride devices we used was only around 85 percent. Devices made using our new platform can raise that to around 95 percent. What does that mean? It means by 2035, we estimate that AIDCs (AI computing data centers) in China alone could require as much electricity as the output of five Three Gorges hydropower stations. After a technology upgrade, the energy losses alone could be reduced by an amount equivalent to the electricity generated by half a Three Gorges station," said Wan.