Kodar ‘Village’ Liangjhu at the center of China’s AI mania

Hangzo: It was a sunshine on Saturday afternoon, and dozens of people were sitting in the grass around a backyard platform, where the aspiring founders of tech startups talked about their views. People in the crowd slipped to drink laptops, vaporing and strawberry Frappuchino. A drone resonated overhead. Inside the house, investors took the pitches in the kitchen.It looked like a Silicon Valley, but it was Liangzhu, a cool suburb of the southern Chinese city of Hangzo, which was closely enticing a warm space and technical talents for entrepreneurs and closely fascinated with technology companies such as Alibaba and Deepsek. “People come here to find out their possibilities,” a former Facebook and Alibaba employee 36, Felix Tao said, who hosted the event. In fact, all those possibilities include AI. As China encounters technical priority with the US, Hangzo has become the center of China’s AI mania. A decade ago, the provincial and local government started offering subsidy and tax break to new firms in Hangzo, a policy that has helped incubate hundreds of startups. On the weekend, people fly to rent programmers from Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.Recently, many of them have ended in the backyard of Tao. Now Tao’s home is a center for coders, who have settled in Liangzhu in the 20s and 30s. They call themselves “rural”, write code in coffee shops during the day and gaming together at night, expect AI to make their companies. Hangzo has already given birth to Tech Powerhouse including Alibaba and Deepsek. Graduates of Hangzo’s Zhejiang University have been formed after the demand of employees in Chinese technical firms. Rokid founder Minging Zhu, which makes AI-enabled glasses, said that government officials had helped him join Rokid’s early investors, including Alibaba founder Jack Ma.But some said that the support of the government scared some investors. Founders said that it was difficult to attract money from foreign enterprise capital firms, disappointing their ambitions to grow outside China. Another uncertainty has access to advanced computer chips. Many people in Tao’s backyard said that the atmosphere in Hangzo was set to the banks of a lake, which was the museum for generations of poets and painters, airing their creativity. Lynn Yunalin, whose Zeebur provided back-end systems to apps and websites, said that he could bow to someone in the coffee shop or wander in the neighbor’s living room and learn what kind of support they need for their startups. Lynn looked at himself so many times in Liangzhu that he went there.