The electric vehicle was the first Chinese technology Europe could see with its own eyes. Between January and April 2026, Chinese brands accounted for around 6% of new car registrations in the European Union, up from roughly 3% a year earlier, according to a compilation based on ACEA data. In the broader European market, including the United Kingdom and EFTA countries, their share was close to 7.3%, compared with 3.7% a year earlier. Countervailing duties did not stop this momentum. They changed its form. BYD is preparing to launch production at its plant in Szeged, Hungary, in late 2026, while its Turkish project was put on hold as the company focused on manufacturing within the European Union, Reuters reports.
That is the real lesson of the first wave. The trade barrier did not reverse the direction of expansion. It shifted it from exports towards a local presence. Other Chinese technology sectors may enter Europe much faster through a local-presence model instead of relying exclusively on exports for years. It took the automotive sector four years and one anti-subsidy investigation to reach this point. The sectors that follow do not need to repeat the same trial-and-error process.
The second wave has already begun. It looks different because, in most cases, it is not arriving as a product in a shipping container.
Autonomous driving: Chinese technology, European operator
August 2026 brought three announcements that, taken together, reveal the entire model.
On 14 August, Pony.ai and Uber expanded their partnership to deploy more than 2,000 robotaxis in Europe. Pony.ai’s overseas pipeline surpassed 4,000 vehicles. Five days later, the announcement became a live service. On 19 August, Europe’s first autonomous rides available through the Uber app launched in Zagreb. A passenger orders a standard UberX or Comfort ride and may be matched with an autonomous vehicle. At this stage, a licensed operator remains behind the wheel to monitor the journey. The service area covers the city centre and is expected to expand gradually.
The division of responsibilities is clear. Pony.ai provides the autonomous-driving system. Croatia’s Verne owns the fleet and operates the service. Uber provides the platform and manages the passenger relationship. Pony.ai CEO James Peng described it explicitly as a “joint deployment model.”
A week earlier, on 3 August, WeRide announced its entry into Denmark in partnership with GreenMobility. Denmark is the company’s sixth European market, after France, Belgium, Switzerland, Slovakia and Spain. The public service is scheduled to launch in the first half of 2027, subject to the required regulatory approvals, while testing will be conducted in coordination with the Danish Road Directorate and the road traffic authority. WeRide is not building its own operator. It is using GreenMobility’s fleet of more than 1,500 electric vehicles and its existing user channels, while introducing the GXR model, which has been type-approved under EU rules.
In both cases, the Chinese side contributes the software, integration and vehicle. The European side contributes the fleet, licence, regulatory relationships and operational responsibility. This is not only about capital efficiency. It also reflects the fact that certain capabilities cannot simply be imported into Europe.
Robotics: the demonstration phase is ending
More than 300 companies exhibited at the World Robot Conference in Beijing, held from 19 to 23 August 2026. They presented more than 2,000 exhibits, including over 150 products shown for the first time. The change from previous editions was qualitative: fewer dance routines and more machines performing repetitive tasks in logistics, quality control and production-line operations.
The hard data confirms the growing scale. Chinese exports of industrial robots reached RMB 6.29 billion in the first half of 2026, up 18.6% year on year, with buyers in 141 countries and regions, according to China’s customs administration. In 2025, China became a net exporter of industrial robots for the first time.
At the same time, some Chinese suppliers are increasingly selling not just a machine, but an entire automation solution. This means a contract that requires deployment at the customer’s site, ongoing servicing and local responsibility for workplace safety. If this direction continues, robotics will enter Europe by the same route as robotaxis: through a team standing on the factory floor, not through a port.
Energy storage: the sector where this has already happened
Anyone who wants to see what the European market looks like after the full arrival of Chinese supply should look at energy storage.
In the first half of 2026, global shipments of cells for energy storage systems rose by 71% year on year to 461.3 GWh. The three largest suppliers were Chinese: CATL with a 27.1% share, Eve Energy with 10.4% and Hithium with 10%. Seven of the top ten companies were Chinese, together accounting for 72.6% of the market. At the system-integrator level, Chinese companies held 76% of the global market in 2025. In Europe, the top three system integrators, Sungrow, BYD and Huawei, are all Chinese.
It is worth noting where the market is growing. For the first time, shipments outside China, covering North America, Europe and other regions, exceeded the Chinese domestic market and accounted for 56.1% of total volume. At this scale of production, overseas expansion is becoming an increasingly important condition for continued growth.
This is also the most infrastructure-intensive sector of the five, which makes it a good illustration of where the European part of the work lies: land, the grid connection, permits, connection terms from the grid operator, insurance and maintenance. The variable that cannot be ignored is EU industrial policy. The Net-Zero Industry Act is intended to strengthen European manufacturing capacity and reduce strategic dependence on individual suppliers, while the Batteries Regulation increases requirements relating to sustainability, traceability and the entire battery life cycle. In practice, both instruments raise the bar for suppliers operating in the European market. As Wood Mackenzie analyst Jiayue Zheng observes, competition in this segment is shifting away from scale and towards regulatory compliance, grid-forming technology and software. This is a description of a market where documentation, not price, determines who wins.
AI infrastructure: Chinese cloud and European sovereignty
On 17 June 2026, Alibaba Cloud launched a region in France with two availability zones, its third European hub after Germany and the United Kingdom. The company announced plans to make agentic services available in Europe in the second half of 2026. Its Chief Technology Officer, Feifei Li, described the expansion in terms of “sovereign, secure and intelligent solutions.”
The pattern here differs from robotaxis. The Chinese company is investing in its own assets rather than using someone else’s. The destination, however, is the same: the infrastructure stands on EU territory and is subject to EU law.
The EU’s technological sovereignty package, published on 3 June 2026, identified limited data-centre capacity as a barrier to digital transformation. Alibaba Cloud, meanwhile, announced plans to increase its modular data-centre capacity several times over while shortening deployment time to 100 days. This may create a paradox. European sovereignty policy increases demand for computing capacity, while part of the response comes from suppliers on which that policy was intended to reduce dependence. Who ultimately fills this gap remains an open question.
Smart logistics: infrastructure for someone else’s goods
Cainiao, Alibaba’s logistics arm, operates more than 40 overseas warehouses across 18 countries in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region. In March 2026, it announced plans to build a network of robotic warehouses, including facilities in the Netherlands, Spain, France and Germany. The objective is defined in operational terms: next-day and two-day delivery from inventory held locally.
This completes the logic running through all the previous sections. Chinese exports cease to be primarily a freight issue and become a matter of industrial real estate, electricity connections, building permits, lease agreements, insurance and employment in Europe.
The common pattern: the operational layer is European
Five sectors, one pattern, although not one ownership model. WeRide and Pony.ai rely on local partners and third-party fleets. Alibaba Cloud and Cainiao build their own assets. Energy storage combines both approaches. The common feature is something else: none of these sectors ends at the port.
Every one of these market entries depends on a layer that a Chinese company cannot bring with it: type approval and certification, a transport licence, access to the power grid, an operator with an established track record, an insurer willing to cover a driverless vehicle, compliance with the GDPR and the AI Act, representation before public authorities, and legal and tax support for a company registered in the European Union.
For European service providers, this represents a shift in demand that is worth recognising early. The first wave generated demand for bringing goods into the market: customs duties, VAT, distribution and after-sales service. The second creates demand for establishing and maintaining operations: certification and type approval, transport and energy law, insurance in segments without established loss data, data advisory, the acquisition and management of industrial real estate, field service, occupational health and safety, and recruitment.
These are longer engagements, with a higher value per contract, and they are much harder to replace with a provider based in China. They are also harder to win because the Chinese decision-maker must know that a particular provider exists while the project is still at the market-selection stage, not after an agreement has already been signed with a partner found by someone else.
What could stop it
An honest forecast must identify the constraints, and they are real.
The Foreign Subsidies Regulation gives the Commission a tool to examine transactions and public tenders financed with state support. The first proceedings concerned Chinese entities. The International Procurement Instrument was used for the first time after unequal treatment of EU medical-device manufacturers in the Chinese market was established, opening a path towards reciprocity in other sectors. In robotaxis and cloud infrastructure, another issue arises that proved decisive in telecommunications: who has access to data collected within the European Union, and under which legal regime. The 5G precedent shows that security concerns can close a European market faster than pricing arguments.
None of these instruments stopped the car. They changed its form of entry, shifting it towards local production, partnerships and entities registered in the European Union. In other words, they created more demand for European services, not less.
Conclusion
The question “Will Chinese technology enter Europe?” is already outdated. The relevant questions are under what legal form it will enter, with which partner and on what infrastructure. The answer emerging from recent months is increasingly clear: through a local presence, a European partner or proprietary infrastructure within the European Union, combined with compliance with EU regulations.
Each of these elements is a service that someone in Europe must provide. The first wave taught European suppliers how to support Chinese goods. The second will require them to support Chinese operations. This is a change in the market, not merely a change in volume.
EnterChina operates a platform that makes European B2B service providers visible to Chinese companies planning activities in Europe. This article is analytical in nature and does not constitute legal or investment advice.
Sources: ACEA (registrations, January-April 2026); Reuters (BYD’s production plans in Szeged and the suspension of the Turkish project); Uber and Pony.ai announcements of 14 and 19 August 2026; WeRide/GreenMobility announcement of 3 August 2026; Beijing Municipal Government and Reuters (World Robot Conference 2026, 19-23 August); CGTN, citing the General Administration of Customs of the People’s Republic of China (16 July 2026); CnEVPost (ESS market, first half of 2026); Energy-Storage.News / Wood Mackenzie (7 July 2026); South China Morning Post (17 June 2026); Parcel and Postal Technology International (13 March 2026); European Commission materials on the FSR, IPI and the technological sovereignty package of 3 June 2026.