Mark Cheng

Founder, Social Innovation Circle | Li Cheng Capital Adjunct Professor of Business, Hong Kong University | impact investor supporting social entrepreneurs

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

Many of the startups I’m working with are doing the same - switching from Claude to open source Chinese models like Kimi, Qwen or DeepSeek.

Massive cost saving. No noticeable performance difference

[Flo Crivello @Altimor]

Pulled the trigger today and switched 100% of Lindy traffic to DeepSeek v4, churning from Anthropic models.
Saves us millions of $ and we're actually seeing an *increase* in performance on many core use cases. Transformative for the business.

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

A further thought on “over capacity” - it’s basically a rich country method for keeping poorer countries down.

Why shouldn’t an emerging market invest to trade and export its way out of poverty?

And when those exports include clean tech like solar and wind that the rest of the world urgently needs, the argument becomes even more absurd and self destructive.

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

Carl Bildt rightly points out the absurdity of ‘over capacity’, the new pseudo-economic excuse being cooked up by EU officials to block imports from China.

Basically it’s the claim that if a country produces more than its own domestic market can absorb then it is somehow ‘cheating’.

Strangely enough, this is only ever applied to China, not to anyone else.

Bildt points out the hypocrisy of not applying this to Germany exporting cars, France exporting wine, Italy exporting fashion etc.

[Carl Bildt @carlbildt]

I find the concept of “overcapacity” ridiculous. Does Germany have an overcapacity in cars? France one in wine? Sweden in heavy trucks? Italy in fashion? And don’t tell me that European food exports aren’t subsidized. https://t.co/Bl2yiF8hdg

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

@MillieMarconnni Great post and Ridley is spot on. Modern social networks are basically an extension of the human neocortex, and the internet (and now AI) puts this on steroids

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

East Asia is on a roll:

South Korea just overtook India as world’s sixth largest stock market, with a value of over $5 trillion. Basically this is down to the Asian tech boom (Samsung).

& Hong Kong just overtook Switzerland the world’s largest wealth hub. 60% of that wealth is from mainland Chinese

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

@RnaudBertrand Rooftop solar is a no brainer for so many parts of the world, esp in emerging markets. The Iran war just made it even more obvious

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

Yep

[Johan Rockström @jrockstrom]

China’s rise in AI, clean energy and advanced technologies is no sudden leap, but the result of decades of strategic investment in science, infrastructure and industrial capacity. New commentary with Inga Strümke in @ProSyn:
https://t.co/t9nD0lXkPn

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

Think renewables are dying in the US thanks to the current administration?

The numbers tell a different story: this year, renewable energy just overtook coal for the first time ever in the US energy mix

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

For the first year on record, wind and solar produced more electricity than coal in the U.S.

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

A friend who’s an industrial user of AI (their startup just burnt through a billion tokens on Claude in no time) tells me that they’ve switched to the Chinese model Kimi (which is open source) and reduced their compute costs >90% with no noticeable drop in quality.

If that’s true across the board, doesn’t bode well for OpenAI and the closed source developers.

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

Interesting sign of the times - Hong Kong has just overtaken Switzerland as a wealth hub, booking more cross border flow of wealth.

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

🤣

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

I remember back in 2009 how critics scoffed at companies trying to deploy solar power.

The refrain was that solar stopped on a cloudy day, and was useless at night.

The same argument was made (and continues to be made) against wind.

No power when the wind drops, right?

And to be honest, when we started nearly 20 years ago, the critics had a point. (Didn’t stop us though).

But battery technology has completely changed all that.

The price of batteries has collapsed more than 95% since we began those early rollouts.

Meanwhile, storage capacity has increased tenfold.

Standalone solar systems can now supply power 24/7 for the majority of countries, even on a cloudy day, and even through the night.

And panel efficiency has tripled, while costs have fallen over 90%.

Today installing new solar power is cheaper and more reliable in many countries such as India than even continuing to operate coal fired power stations.

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

It’s official - solar power is now an effective 24/7 technology, thanks to the astonishing collapse in the price of batteries over the past decade (45% reduction in 2025 alone).

[Assaad Razzouk @AssaadRazzouk]

We have entered the incredible new era of 24/7 firm renewable power, an industrial and sovereign inevitability. The economics are brutal for anyone holding fossil assets. Here's the raw data from the latest 2026 IRENA, IEA, and Ember reports:

THREAD

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

The great decoupling is continuing apace

[hailey @haileyhmt]

for startup founders with chinese (or hong kong) nationality who want to build in the US, this recent wave of news feels increasingly concerning.

- bloomberg reports china is increasing restrictions on overseas travel for some top ai talent, and cases like manus suggest stronger control over founders and acquisitions.

- in the case of manus, the government allegedly blocked a potential acquisition deal by meta, called the founder back, and then restricted their ability to travel abroad afterwards.

- at the same time, the US is reportedly tightening parts of the green card process, with more cases potentially requiring applicants to return to their home country for consular processing.

taken together, i wouldn’t be surprised if investors start getting worried about what happens when founders have to go back to their home country for visa/green card.

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

This is a huge milestone, and shows how confident the Chinese government is that the country is now ready for opening up internally and externally.

Hukou was set up in part to prevent Chinese cities being flooded with uncontrolled rural migration.

But China is reaching peak urbanisation. In fact the trend is now the other way- people starting to move out of the big cities and back into the countryside.

So this is the right time to relax the hukou system

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

This is a huge milestone, and shows how confident the Chinese government is that the country is now ready for opening up internally and externally.

Hukou was set up in part to prevent Chinese cities being flooded with uncontrolled rural migration.

But China is reaching peak urbanisation. In fact the trend is now the other way- people starting to move out of the big cities and back into the countryside.

So this is the right time to relax the hukou system

[Balaji @balajis]

China is opening up internally.

For generations, the hukou system meant the average Chinese national couldn’t freely emigrate within China. Like being geolocked to New York and being unable to relocate to Texas.

China did this in part for social control, and in part to prevent huge floods of people from moving to big Chinese cities for jobs before the infrastructure was available.

But now development in China is so broad-based, and the infrastructure so reliable, that they are gradually opening the borders *within* China by letting everyone move around.

The Soviets also had a system of internal passports. But the new Chinese system is less similar to traditional communism, and more similar to the Schengen region for the EU, or the free migration between the fifty states within the US.

In many ways China is moving in the opposite direction from the West, by opening up visa-free travel to China for 50 countries, introducing the K visa for skilled migrants, and gradually shelving the hukou system.

The overall trend is towards more free (albeit still controlled) flows of capital and talent within China.

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

@RnaudBertrand Which is why using the ‘following’ feed and not the ‘for you’ is more important than ever

[Mark Cheng @markch3ng]

The future of AI data centers isn’t in space. It’s under the waves.

SpaceX just filed for an IPO, and one of their selling points is the idea of building data centers in orbit.

Sounds great in theory, doesn’t it?

The biggest challenge for data centers is energy and cooling, and space seems to give both in abundance.

Except that there’s a much better, cheaper solution lying all around us: the ocean.

Microsoft proved it years ago with Project Natick.

They dropped a sealed pod off Scotland, filled it with real servers, and left it alone for two years.

Eight times fewer failures than the exact same hardware on land.

Zero water used for cooling. Ran on 100% renewables.

They pulled it up, analyzed it, and quietly moved on — because the experiment was already over. The ocean had won.

China is doing the same.

Right now, in 2026, real commercial underwater AI data centers are operating off Hainan and Shanghai.

1,300-ton modules lowered into the sea, serving actual customers, slashing cooling energy by up to 90%, and delivering the same near-perfect efficiency.

No launch costs. No radiation. No 500-millisecond latency. No maintenance missions.

Just cold seawater doing what $100 billion worth of chillers and evaporative towers struggle to do on land.

Space data centers solve for spectacle. Ocean data centers solve for physics.

One requires you to escape Earth’s gravity. The other uses the 71% of the planet we already ignore.

The AI explosion isn’t waiting for orbital real estate.

It’s waiting for someone to stop romanticizing rockets and start noticing the ocean is literally the most powerful, free, and underutilized cooling system on Earth — sitting right there, patient, infinite, and already proven.