The mecca for China’s boom in artificial intelligence is Liangzhu, a leafy suburb of Hangzhou, the tech-heavy capital of Zhejiang province. The Communist Party has long touted Liangzhu’s famous archaeological remains, dating back to 3300BC, as proof of the age of Chinese civilisation. Now Liangzhu, with its myriad AI startups, represents the future. Investors from all over China flock there to meet growing numbers of founders, app engineers and other AI developers and dreamers. It is six months since a barely known AI startup, DeepSeek, caused a huge stir by releasing an impressive open-source model trained for a sliver of the cost of fancier Western ones. Its founder studied at Zhejiang University, a tech mothership not far from Liangzhu. The area is at the heart of an AI ecosystem which China hopes will soon rival America’s.