Chinese AI Sells Ecosystem, Not Benchmarks
More than fifty Chinese speakers take a stage built for partnership hunting rather than leaderboards.
Web Summit opened in Lisbon on 9 November 2026 and runs to 12 November, drawing roughly 70,000 participants from 157 countries. More than fifty speakers from China are on the programme, including MiniMax, Unitree, Agibot, Xiaomi, Tencent and Manus, with 10 November hosting an open models, open markets session that puts MiniMax’s global business lead, ModelBest’s Li Dahai and Neo4j’s CTO on one stage. The framing is the signal: Chinese AI companies are now pitching open ecosystems and partnership terms to European buyers rather than parameter counts.