Images by Jen Evans, Web Summit
We are weeks away from Web Summit Lisbon, and founder Paddy Cosgrave made some exciting announcements today about the AI track. The world’s most highly respected tech and culture conference is expanding its Chinese AI and robotics programme in Lisbon this November, bringing companies behind GLM, MiMo, Hy4 and Manus into direct conversation with European customers. The announcement gives business attendees an opportunity to talk to the people building these systems about their products, ask deployment requirements and learn more about international ambitions.
In a message announcing 30 Chinese AI and robotics speakers, Paddy Cosgrave described the additions as the first of several waves of Chinese speakers and exhibitors spanning AI, robotics and quantum computing. Web Summit takes place in Portugal November 9–12, 2026. “These Chinese companies are coming to meet and speak with their growing customer base in Europe, to answer hard questions and to talk about the future of AI, robotics, quantum computing and more,” Cosgrave wrote.
The published speaker lineup includes Zixuan Li, chief product officer at Zhipu AI/GLM; Fei Xu, chief marketing officer at Xiaomi/MiMo; Ling Ge, chief investment and strategy officer for EMEA at Tencent/Hy4; and Tao Zhang, co-founder and chief product officer at Manus AI. ModelBest co-founder and CEO Dahai Li and Pony.ai co-founder and CFO Leo Haojun Wang are also listed.
The programme extends beyond software. Web Summit’s speaker page includes AgiBot’s A3 humanoid and PrimeBOT Q1 personal robot, alongside Galbot’s G1 embodied large-model robot and ET1 entertainment humanoid. It also lists Tsinghua University quantum researcher Zhiyuan Liu, economist Jiong Gong and Eurasia Group China director Dan Wang. Cosgrave said the broader additions include voices on antitrust and AI regulation.
The announcement ties the expanded Chinese presence to a sharp increase in model usage. Citing OpenRouter, Cosgrave said Chinese models accounted for as little as 6% of token usage in February, rising to as much as 67% by September 14. Those figures describe activity on OpenRouter, rather than the entire AI market. OpenRouter’s rankings measure tokens processed through its API; they do not measure the number of consumers or businesses using a model, or their spending. Some of the more interesting expected tracks:
AI in production: For business attendees, one of the most useful discussions is always about how these products perform in production, in actual live operations. The conference gives attendees the opportunity to ask vendors and customers about cost per completed task, reliability, integration, language support and the human work required to supervise or correct their systems. For robotics suppliers, it means examining deployment conditions, maintenance and evidence of useful performance beyond a stage demonstration.
AI sovereignty. A model’s country of origin is one part of a procurement decision. Buyers also need to establish where it runs, who operates the infrastructure, what information leaves their environment, which licences apply and whether they can change providers without rebuilding an application.
Chinese development: Cosgrave is positioning Lisbon as a meeting point between Chinese technology companies and their international customers, who want to know what the systems can reliably do, what they cost to operate and how much control customers retain after deployment of open weight models.
Sources and editorial notes:
● Speaker announcement supplied by the user; direct quotation and historical usage figures attributed to Paddy Cosgrave.
● Web Summit 2026 speakers: names, titles and listed robots.
● Web Summit: November 9–12, 2026 event dates.
● OpenRouter rankings and methodology: platform-specific usage measurement. The cited February and September 14 percentages require the original chart or dataset for independent verification.
