A range of cutting-edge applications, from underground parking navigation to unmanned retail and smart food preparation, showed how computing power empowers daily life and a wide range of industries at the 2026 China Computational Power Conference held from Friday to Sunday in Langfang City, north China's Hebei Province.
One of the most popular attractions is this AI-powered automatic pancake machine.
Thanks to computing power, the machine can "understand" pancakes and autonomously complete the entire production process, churning out a steaming-hot pancake in just three minutes.
"Pancakes are made from a variety of ingredients -- water, flour and eggs, and the production process is flexible. For a robot, this presents a highly complex level of uncertainty. So we use substantial computing power including our vision systems and temperature sensors to systematically address the uncertainties throughout the entire production process. We've already deployed nearly 50 units in Singapore, Australia and Spain where they've been well-received by local Chinese communities and people from various countries," said Hu Wentao, an exhibitor at the event.
A robotic unmanned supermarket on display also relies on computing power to enable intelligent product recognition and automatic checkout.
The exhibitor said such a supermarket operates 24 hours a day, and currently, it takes about 20 seconds to fulfill an order.
Another small device at the show is able to transmit BeiDou navigation signals into underground parking garages, allowing residents to be navigated directly to available parking spaces as smoothly as on the ground.
"We've currently implemented a demonstration project for underground navigation at the Rongdong Parking Lot in Xiong'an, which spans approximately 1.6 million square meters and boasts over 30,000 parking spaces. Moving forward, we'll also apply this technology to support emergency response, vehicle positioning and logistics delivery," said Zhang Shuo, exhibitor at the expo.
At the exhibition, a new computing power product making its debut has particularly caught the eye.
It goes by the evocative name: prefabricated computing cabin.
"We are bringing the concept of prefabrication into the computing power sector. By prefabricating more than 90 percent of all integrated racks and air- and liquid-cooled equipment at the factory, we can complete installation and commissioning within 24 hours of arriving on site. Our 256-GPU unit is essentially a small intelligent computing center, capable of supporting about 10,000 to 20,000 users of highly complex AI large models in processing their tasks," said the exhibitor Chen Xinjie.
Computing power steps into daily life at 2026 China Computational Power Conference
China's benchmark Shanghai Composite Index closed almost flat on Monday amid a wide sell-off of artificial intelligence-related stocks triggered by calls from top executives of major U.S. AI developers to slow the pace of AI development, according to Timothy Pope, an analyst for China Global Television Network (CGTN).
The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 0.07 percent to 3,885.33 points on Monday, while the Shenzhen Component Index closed 0.64 percent lower at 13,384.57 points.
The ChiNext Index, tracking China's Nasdaq-style board of growth enterprises, lost 1.10 percent to close at 3,285.58 points Monday. The STAR Composite Index, which reflects the performance of stocks on China's sci-tech innovation board, closed 0.35 percent lower at 1,811.23 points.
Pope noted that despite the overall resilience of major indexes, AI hardware stocks were among the biggest losers on the day.
"The Chinese mainland markets proved pretty resilient today actually as global AI stocks wobbled. We saw oil prices jump and interest-rate hike bets rising as well. The Shanghai Composite Index ended the session pretty much flat, while the Shenzhen Component [Index] lost a little more than half of 1 percent. AI stocks around the world sank today after the Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for a slowdown in the development of frontier AI models. That was also backed up by OpenAI boss Sam Altman and some other industry leaders as well. But critically for Chinese companies, Amodei also called for tighter restrictions on exports of advanced AI chips and semiconductor equipment to China. We saw AI shares on the A-share have been caught in a bit of a rotation cycle already lately, with investors switching in and out pretty aggressively from these AI hardware stocks. So that added some extra momentum to today's move out of that sector. They were falling and were one of the weaker sectors today," said Pope.
The analyst said stocks of listed big state-own banks saw an injection of capitals from investors amid AI sell-off.
"Investors took some shelter in financial stocks. The big state-owned banks were once again helping to support the Shanghai index and investors were also waiting for the latest bank-lending data, although that wasn't released before the close of the markets today. There was also a small rebalance in the STAR 50 today. A handful of new companies joined the high-tech index, but that didn't fundamentally change things for the pressured tech sector," he said.
Pope highlighted that Chinese investors will witness a slew of data release in the rest of the week, helping them to have a more comprehensive grasp of the status of the country's domestic demand.
"For the week ahead in China, it's going to be very data-heavy. Tomorrow we have a big data dump including fixed-asset investment, property data, retail sales and industrial production and that's really going to give the market some clues about the state of domestic demand after those very strong trade figures that we saw last week," he said.
Chinese stocks resilient as calls for AI slowdown trigger sell-off: analyst
