Coder 'village' at the heart of China's artificial intelligence boom

Meaghan Tobin

 

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and dozens of people sat in the grass around a backyard stage where aspiring founders of tech start-ups talked about their ideas. People in the crowd slouched over laptops, vaping and drinking strawberry Frappuccinos. A drone buzzed overhead. Inside the house, investors took pitches in the kitchen. 

It looked like Silicon Valley, but it was Liangzhu, a quiet suburb of the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou, which is a hot spot for entrepreneurs and tech talent lured by low rents and proximity to tech companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek. 

“People come here to explore their own possibilities,” said Felix Tao, 36, a former Facebook and Alibaba employee who hosted the event. 

Virtually all of those possibilities involve artificial intelligence. As China faces off with the United States over tech primacy, Hangzhou has become the center of China’s AI frenzy. A decade ago, the provincial and local governments started offering subsidies and tax breaks to new companies in Hangzhou, a policy that has helped incubate hundreds of startups. On weekends, people fly in from Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen to hire programmers. 

Lately, many of them have ended up in  Tao’s backyard. He helped found an AI research lab at Alibaba before leaving to start his own company, Mindverse, in 2022. Now Tao’s home is a hub for coders who have settled in Liangzhu, many in their 20s and 30s. They call themselves “villagers,” writing code in coffee shops during the day and gaming together at night, hoping to harness AI to create their own firms. 

Hangzhou has already birthed tech powerhouses, not only Alibaba and DeepSeek but also NetEase and Hikvision. In January, DeepSeek shook the tech world when it released an AI system that it said it had made for a small fraction of the cost that Silicon Valley companies had spent on their own. Since then, systems made by DeepSeek and Alibaba have ranked among the top-performing open source AI models in the world, meaning they are available for anyone to build on. Graduates from Hangzhou’s Zhejiang University, where DeepSeek’s founder studied, have become sought-after employees at Chinese tech companies. 

Chinese media closely followed the poaching of a core member of DeepSeek’s team by the electronics company Xiaomi. In Liangzhu, many engineers said they were killing time until they could create their own startups, waiting out noncompete agreements they had signed at bigger companies like ByteDance. DeepSeek is one of six AI and robotics startups from the city that Chinese media calls the “six tigers of Hangzhou”. 

Last year, one of the six, Game Science, released China’s first big-budget video game to become a global hit, Black Myth: Wukong. Another firm, Unitree, grabbed public attention in January when its robots danced onstage during the Chinese state broadcaster’s televised annual spring gala. 

 Liangzhu villagers have been hosting film nights. They had recently gathered to watch “The Matrix.” Afterward, they decided the movie should be required viewing, Lin said.