TRO | Apple Intelligence Breaks Into The Chinese Market

Plus, DeepSeek Triples Its Value In Three Months and SpaceX Shares Dip Below Their IPO Price

Author

Meliora Company
July 20, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

 Subscribe | 20th July, 2026

In this fast-moving Vertical AI economy, headlines are everywhere but optimism is rare.

Here’s our take on 3 stories that will help you be relentlessly optimistic about the future.

1. Apple Intelligence Launches In China, With Alibaba And Baidu Powering It

Apple Intelligence has received regulatory approval from China's Cyberspace Administration to launch in the country, more than two years after debuting elsewhere. The rollout will integrate Alibaba's Qwen AI model across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, with Baidu also confirmed as a partner for additional Apple Intelligence features. Apple is also said to be exploring integrations with DeepSeek and ByteDance. Greater China generated US$20.5 billion in Apple revenue in Q2 2026, up 28% year on year, and Apple recently reclaimed its second position in China's smartphone market.

Here’s why this matters: To gain regulatory approval in China, Apple has replaced its Western AI partners with local ones, integrating Alibaba's Qwen and Baidu's models rather than OpenAI or Google Gemini. That is the price of access to 1.4 billion consumers in the world's second-largest economy, and it sets a precedent for every technology company with global AI ambitions. For the broader industry, the implication is clear: any AI product that wants to operate at global scale will need a localised AI strategy. The era of one model for the world is over before it properly began.

2. DeepSeek Goes From US$40 Billion To US$71 Billion In Three Months

DeepSeek completed its first external funding round in late May, raising approximately US$7 billion at a US$52 billion valuation, with Tencent, CATL, JD.com, and NetEase among the institutional backers. A Chinese stock exchange filing this week confirmed the valuation for the first time publicly. The company is now in preliminary talks with new investors at a pre-money valuation of US$71 billion, less than two months after closing its first round, and has begun IPO preparations with a potential filing in 2026 and listing in 2027. Founder Liang Wenfeng holds approximately 78% equity and a personal net worth of US$36 billion.

Here’s why this matters: DeepSeek's valuation trajectory, from US$10 billion in April to US$71 billion in July, is one of the most remarkable in AI history, and it arrives with a specific competitive implication. The company that reset global expectations about what AI models cost to build is now raising capital to accelerate the gap further. For Western AI companies preparing their own public listings, a DeepSeek IPO in 2027 would represent a direct and well-capitalised Chinese challenger competing on the same public market stage. The race between the US and China for AI supremacy is no longer just a geopolitical conversation. It is becoming a financial markets one.

3. SpaceX Shares Dip Below Their IPO Price Six Weeks After Debut

SpaceX's share price fell to US$132.62 on Wednesday, dropping below its June IPO price of US$135 for the first time and sitting 41% below its post-float peak. The decline comes amid broader tech stock volatility, but SpaceX has underperformed the wider Nasdaq index, which fell just 0.2% on the same day. When Starlink announced price cuts in Memphis amid local concerns over a data centre project, SpaceX shares fell 8% in a single session. The company's first public earnings report is expected in August.

Here’s why this matters: SpaceX's post-IPO trajectory is being watched closely because it is the first major data point for what public market investors actually think of AI-adjacent infrastructure companies at scale. At debut, SpaceX was treated by many investors as a proxy for the AI trade - the first opportunity to buy into an AI-era company at this scale. The reality of its business, rockets and satellites with a nascent and loss-making AI division, has since reasserted itself. For OpenAI and Anthropic, both preparing their own listings, SpaceX's cooling share price is a useful recalibration: the market is beginning to apply more rigorous scrutiny to the gap between AI ambition and AI revenue.

Australian PM, Anthony Albanese, has written the rules for a game Australia doesn’t play, yet

Australia has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape its AI future, not simply adopt someone else’s.

In this latest Meliora insight, we explore why the conversation is shifting from whether Australia needs a sovereign AI strategy, to how we build one that balances innovation, security and competitiveness.

Still Curious?

Our Pursuit Of Better

Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has released Inkling, an open-weight AI model that enterprises can download, host, and fine-tune on their own data without that knowledge being absorbed back into a third-party lab. Bridgewater Associates fine-tuned a similar model on its own financial expertise and beat top proprietary models on financial reasoning benchmarks at one fourteenth of the running cost.

Databricks is raising approximately US$3 billion at a US$188 billion valuation led by Coatue, its fourth major raise in 18 months, having climbed from US$62 billion in December 2024. The company's own benchmarking of 3,000 engineers found that open-weight models, specifically Z.ai's GLM 5.2, now handle the highest complexity coding tasks at lower total cost than proprietary models from Anthropic and OpenAI, with the choice of agentic harness proving equally important to cost as the model itself.

Fora, a New York-based AI-powered travel agency, has raised US$60 million in Series C funding at a US$1 billion valuation, led by Salesforce Ventures. The platform combines an AI booking and itinerary tool with a community of over 10,000 independent travel advisors, who use it to manage clients and build their own businesses. Fora processed US$1 billion in travel bookings in 2025 and is on track to double that in 2026.

The Pursuit of Better, Together

If this week’s newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a colleague. The best conversations often start with “You’ve got to read this”.