Web Summit will bring its biggest delegation of Chinese technology leaders yet to Lisbon in November, the conference announced on 9 October, according to Essential Business and Fast Company Middle East. Founders, presidents and executives from Tencent, Pony.ai, Manus AI, Xiaomi, XPENG, Hisense Group, AGIBOT and Galbot are due to speak, and Chinese humanoid robots will be on site. The event runs from November 9 to 12 and expects more than 70,000 attendees.
Two arms of the Chinese state are also sending delegations: the Ministry of Commerce, which sets foreign trade and investment policy and leads Chinese companies' push into global markets, and the Cyberspace Administration of China, the regulator for the internet, data security and generative AI. The organisers describe it as the most significant gathering of the country's tech leaders ever at a Western tech event.
"Few have ever spoken in the West"
"Adoption of Chinese AI and robotics has no sign of slowing down," said Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit's founder and chief executive. "Few of these Chinese technology leaders have ever spoken in the West until now." He said the names announced so far are the first of several waves of Chinese speakers and exhibitors.
The numbers behind the pitch
Web Summit framed the line-up with figures from other sources. OpenRouter, which tracks how developers use AI models, found Chinese models accounted for 57 to 67% of tokens on its platform in the week of September 14, 2026, up from 6 to 13% in February. Andreessen Horowitz found that 80% of developers building with open-source tools were using Chinese technology. Chinese electric cars hold 14% of the European market, China made nearly four in five of the humanoid robots shipped worldwide in the first half of 2026, according to IDC, and it produces 85% of the world's solar panels.
Cosgrave has argued this for years: in 2018 he told China Daily that this was "China's century".
Who else is on stage
More than 700 founders and executives will speak across 17 tracks, among them Danielle Perszyk, director of cognitive science at Amazon's AGI Lab, Michele Catasta, president and head of AI at Replit, Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission's executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, and Tao Zhang, co-founder of Manus.
