Alexandre Acra, 2026 Summer Study Program Participant

Alexandre Acra, Math

What is China’s Silicon Valley? Having grown up in Palo Alto and attended Stanford, I was curious about whether there was a single location in China with a similar confluence of education and industry that sparked a unique degree of innovation. I asked this question at every tech-related visit, and got a variety of answers, ranging from Shenzhen to rejecting the premise that China had only one place with such a concentration of technology. However, one day (and associated location) that stood out to me in answering this question was June 25, when we visited Galbot and Newborn Town.

Staring out the window of Galbot’s office, I was pointed to PKU and Tsinghua’s neighboring campuses, later learning about how Galbot directly hired researchers from these universities akin to Stanford and Berkeley’s local ties. As we progressed through Galbot’s office, things felt familiar — I felt like I was in a 2010s Google or Facebook campus, upgraded 10 years into the future. While optimistic imaging of a bountiful and green future (with associated over the top perks in the office) has largely faded at big tech companies post-Covid in Silicon Valley, in China’s tech companies, the future remains a place of hope and wonder, where efficiency and environmental goals aren’t at odds, but instead the same end. While it’s difficult to separate the tailored experiences and messaging we got in showrooms and demos from actual sentiment, it says something that even aspirations felt loftier. I tried to avoid romanticizing or over-emphasizing differences between the United States and China, but this one showed up consistently across all of our visits.

Back to my original question, while I wasn’t particularly surprised at how familiar Galbot felt (since I had seen demos of their products, and researched humanoid robots before the trip), the visit to Newborn Town cemented the feeling of Silicon Valley in Beijing for me. In contrast to Galbot’s research-heavy, university-tied, heavily-funded structure, Newborn Town was young, hip, and consumer-oriented, feeling more like Silicon Valley (the TV show) than any big tech company I’d experienced. We were greeted by dynamic and young employees, and got to visit an office with an open layout of ergonomic desks and chairs covered in stuffed animals. Their business was AI-native, but focused much more on user experience and features than deep research. This was the analog to a different side of Silicon Valley, and started to complete the picture of a nuanced tech landscape just within Beijing for me, all within a day.

I’m not sure it was possible to get a definitive answer to my original question within 2 weeks and across such a breadth of visits, but I did find compelling anecdotes that made me feel at home despite being thousands of miles away. All of our visits confirmed that for innovation to be fostered, there needs to be a set of cultural and economic conditions that transcend any nationality, including ties to universities and a curiosity and optimism for the world. Across the scale of the visits we did and of China as a whole, it’s difficult to draw unifying conclusions about any one topic, which is why first-hand experiences to gather senses of reality are so powerful, particularly being able to speak to young people in similar positions to us. Having completed this trip directly after our graduation, I felt like my mind was opened up to an even broader world of possibilities for my future, with an extra billion people I think I can connect with if I continue to explore China.