Two artificial intelligence models built by Chinese firms achieved a perfect score at this month’s International Mathematical Olympiad in Shanghai, the first time any AI system has matched the performance of the very best human contestants. Only seven of the 666 participants, all aged under 20, attained full marks. Huawei’s Celia system and Xiaohongshu’s dots-note-3.0 each solved all six problems under official competition conditions: the questions were released only after the human exam ended, answers were submitted within a strict time limit, and no human intervention was permitted during testing. A partner at the US investment firm Menlo Ventures later reported that four other cutting-edge models—from OpenAI, Anthropic, Axiom Math and China’s Moonshot AI—also scored 42 out of 42 when he gave them the same problems, leading him to conclude that the frontier of AI has moved well past IMO-level mathematics.

The milestone caps a rapid trajectory. At the 2024 Olympiad, Google’s model reached silver-medal level, solving four of six problems over two to three days. By 2025, models from Google and OpenAI had reached gold-medal standard but still fell short of the handful of humans who scored 100%. The leap to a perfect score in 2026, achieved independently by multiple labs, signals that AI reasoning capabilities in structured problem-solving now overlap with the top tier of young human talent.

This scientific advance coincides with a powerful economic current. Chinese customs data for the first half of 2026 show integrated-circuit exports nearly doubling year-on-year to US$177.3 billion, while exports of automatic data-processing equipment jumped 41% to US$138.1 billion. In South Korea, semiconductor exports surged 180% in annualised terms in the first three weeks of July. The AI-driven demand has redrawn the map of emerging-market equities: South Korean and Taiwanese stocks have risen 61% and 53% respectively this year, and the two economies now account for more than half the weight of the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, displacing mainland China and India. Chinese AI developers are also expanding their global software footprint. Shanghai-based MiniMax generated 73% of its 2025 revenue outside mainland China, serving over 214,000 enterprise customers and developers across more than 100 countries.

More AI labs are expected to publish their Olympiad results in the coming days. In financial markets, the immediate focus will be on whether the semiconductor export cycle sustains its momentum into the second half of the year, and how central banks in Seoul and Taipei respond to the inflationary pressures that accompany such rapid tech-sector growth.