RURAL REVOLUTION

The coder 'village' at the heart of China's Al frenzy

- 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 startups 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 centre of China's Al 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 Al 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 companies.

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 Al system that it said it had made for a small fraction of the cost that Silicon Valley companies had spent on their own.