On the morning of the 10th, BYD Racing Park in Zhengzhou, an inland city in China. I headed into 1.5 meters of water in the U8, the electric sport utility vehicle (SUV) model of Yangwang, BYD's "hundred-million-won" premium brand. When the water rose to wheel height, I felt the wheels were powerfully "cutting through" the current, but once the water soon submerged the hood, it felt like being on a boat rather than in a car.
As the water level deepened, the windows and sunroof automatically opened along with a guide voice, and the wheels moving left and right in the water looked as if they were rowing. The dormant underwater propulsion unit also began to operate. Not a single drop of water seeped into the car. A site official said, "This technology was developed to prepare for crisis situations such as flooding. It can stay in water for about two hours," adding, "Smartphone waterproofing technology is applied to the body, allowing it to naturally float."
Next to the large water tank stood a steep sand dune like one you would see at a ski resort. The U8 that had been driving in the water kicked up sand as it climbed and descended the dune. The dune holds a Guinness World Record, with a vertical height of 29.6 meters and a slope of 28 degrees. A company official said, "In addition to the strong power to go straight up and down a steep sand dune, the precise technology that enables a U-turn even at a sharp angle is also a standout feature of the U8." According to the official, the Yangwang U8 is sold for 1.08 million yuan (about 230 million won) for the Chinese domestic market. For overseas sales, it plans to first throw down the gauntlet in the Middle East market.
◇ Dedicated export yard established… BYD at the heart of the Zhengzhou special zone
The new energy vehicle industrial park in the Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone is accelerating its development. Rapidly expanding with a target area of 100 square kilometers, the park is centered on BYD. The BYD Zhengzhou plant broke ground in 37 days and began mass production in 17 months, producing one finished vehicle every 50 seconds and one battery cell every 3 seconds. This plant is among BYD's largest in scale and capacity. Since it went into full operation in 2023, cumulative production has surpassed 1 million units and accounts for more than 80% of new energy vehicle production in Henan province.
Behind that is a high level of automation. Entering the assembly plant, a massive vertical structure stood out. Large grippers, like those on a claw machine, hung from ceiling rails built with tall vertical steel beams, and pulleys moved up and down carrying bodies to and fro. When a finished body came off the conveyor belt, it was lifted to the second floor, a ceiling-mounted gripper grabbed it, placed it on the rail, and moved it to the next process.
Human involvement was visible only at the final stage of assembly, in the hood and tire assembly and visual inspection. Bodies that had ridden the slow, massive conveyor belt and completed inspection then underwent a driving check by crossing dozens of consecutive bumps and were neatly parked inside the plant.
A separate logistics base has also been set up in the special zone for exporting BYD vehicles. On the afternoon of the same day, at the western working area of the Zhengzhou International Land Port, Toyota vehicles for domestic sales were being unloaded from freight trains and warehoused, while on the opposite side of the trains stretched an endless BYD-only area. Inside the fenced-off section, BYD vehicles awaiting export were parked as far as the eye could see. All of them were manufactured at the Zhengzhou plant here. From here, they are loaded onto freight trains and exported to Europe and elsewhere.
◇ China's largest computing center, based on domestic CPUs… Accelerating IT ecosystem self-reliance
The Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone is building not only an electric vehicle cluster but also an information technology (IT) industry cluster worth trillions of yuan. It spans smartphone manufacturing to semiconductors, servers, and computing centers, and it is forming an independent technology ecosystem based on China-made central processing units (CPUs) and artificial intelligence (AI) computing power.
Visited on the morning of the 9th, the Henan Airport Computing Center (hereinafter the center) is the largest AI computing center in central China, with an investment of more than 30 billion yuan (about 6 trillion won). Its total computing power reaches 10,000 petaflops (P), the largest in China. It develops its own large models and also runs partners' models. The center is equipped with 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), including the H100, B100, and B200. Considering that xAI, led by Elon Musk, which is at the forefront of the global AI market, has about 200,000 GPUs, this is a considerable number.
Leveraging this massive computing power, the center is developing AI for governments and public institutions. It has independently developed AI agents in areas such as audit, firefighting, and civil complaints, and the audit bureau and fire brigade of the Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone are using them in practice. Among them, the "AI Board of Audit and Inspection" is based on 300,000 audit report data provided by the China National Audit Office and is set to be rolled out nationwide. A center official said, "Our goal is to build the largest 'AI intelligence-body factory' in the central region."
Nearby, CPU maker Loongson is also located. CPUs, the brain of computers, have their market split between Intel and AMD, and Loongson has succeeded in domesticating them and is rapidly catching up with global corporations. Starting as a research project in 2001, Loongson accumulated technology quickly with substantial central government support, entered the market in earnest in the 2010s, and in 2022 listed on the STAR Market as the No. 1 Chinese CPU corporations.
At Loongson's Central Plains headquarters, visited on the morning of the 9th, a company representative demonstrated a performance comparison with an Intel CPU. It compared Loongson's 2023 CPU and its self-developed operating system with Intel's 2020 CPU and Windows 10. Opening a 50 mb document took Loongson less than a second, while Intel took more than three seconds. Although the release timings of the Loongson and Intel CPU models differed, making it difficult to compare technical capabilities, the representative said, "It proves that the performance gap between China-made CPUs and global big-company CPUs has narrowed."
According to the company, Loongson's biggest feature is that it has its own instruction set architecture. A Loongson representative said, "If you have an instruction set, you can build the entire information industry system. That is because it is the foundation of the ecosystem," adding, "Beyond the Intel system and ARM and Android, we must build a system of our own. Loongson aims to build this and break the monopoly on the technology ecosystem."