Mexico’s Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology, and Innovation signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s Ministry of Science and Technology on September 6, 2026, aimed at joint work on artificial intelligence, supercomputing, robotics, electromobility, and talent. The deal came out of the ninth meeting of the Mexico-China science and technology subcommittee of the Permanent Binational Commission. Secihti secretary Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez hosted Yin Hejun, China’s science and technology minister, in the first time a Chinese science minister has attended the subcommittee since it was created in 2004.

Ruiz said Mexico wants to learn from China’s record in mathematics, AI applications, and the link between labs and industry. She pointed to two domestic projects already on the books: the National High-Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence Cluster, which is meant to connect the country’s main compute sites for researchers, and Coatlicue, infrastructure for training national AI models, scientific simulation, and large-scale data analysis.

“We have a history of cooperation, but above all we have an agenda for the future.” Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez, secretary, Secihti

The memorandum, framed as reciprocal and mutually beneficial, covers university and company research, conferences, policy exchanges, training, public-private digital infrastructure, and transfers of advanced technology. Officials also discussed academic mobility and joint intergovernmental funding. Mexico presented a wider project list that includes electromobility, the New World screwworm, river cleanup, chip design, ocean-weather monitoring, satellite watch over the Gulf of Mexico, sargassum, agriculture, water, and energy.

Yin Hejun said the scientific relationship is part of more than five decades of diplomacy and called for deeper technology cooperation on the digital divide, energy, and health. Mexico’s ambassador to China, Jesús Seade Kuri, joined by video. The Chinese side included officials from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Natural Science Foundation, Guangdong’s science department, and water and agriculture institutes.

Decoded Take

An MoU is not a compute cluster. What Mexico put on the table is a shopping list (Coatlicue, a national HPC fabric, chips, Gulf monitoring) and a request for Chinese training and industrial muscle. What China put on the table is a ministerial visit and a framework that can stay symbolic if no joint call, no shared machine, and no student cohort follows. The tell is whether Coatlicue or the national cluster shows a named Chinese partner, a funding window, or a researcher exchange in the next budget cycle. Watch also for how Mexico balances this opening against U.S. export rules on advanced chips. A science-ministry handshake is cheap. A shared training run on Mexican soil is the proof.