SK Hynix is spending $720bn as its shares fall by half
SK Hynix is spending $720bn as its shares fall by half

High-bandwidth memory is the part of an AI system that nobody photographs. It sits next to the processor and feeds it data, and if it is too slow the expensive chip waits. It is made by stacking ordinary DRAM, the same memory that goes into laptops and…

A billion-dollar game deleted a character in 8 days. Then it had the worst month of its life
A billion-dollar game deleted a character in 8 days. Then it had the worst month of its life

In June, Love and Deepspace took about $38m across the App Store and Google Play. In July it took just over $10m, mobilegamer.biz reported this week, citing Sensor Tower. The game slid to 16th in the monthly gacha rankings, having never before dropped …

As AI safety concerns mount, three pioneers make the case for staying open

At Ai4, three of the world’s most respected AI experts—Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ng—debated regulation, open-source access, and how America can compete as China advances in Asia.

Nvidia is building a trillion-parameter open model, and it would still be smaller than China’s
Nvidia is building a trillion-parameter open model, and it would still be smaller than China’s

Nvidia released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning on Tuesday. It is a 30 billion parameter mixture-of-experts model with three billion active at any moment. The architecture is a hybrid of Mamba-2, MoE and attention layers, with a one million token context window…

Tencent’s AI compute bill outgrew its cash flow, and the fallback plan is becoming a landlord
Tencent’s AI compute bill outgrew its cash flow, and the fallback plan is becoming a landlord

Tencent reported second-quarter revenue of 204.8bn yuan ($30.4bn) on Wednesday, up 11% and ahead of forecasts. Net profit came in at 56bn yuan against the 61.8bn analysts expected, CNBC reports. Capital expenditure rose 176% on the year to 52.8bn yuan,…

Electric cars just hit a record share of China’s market. Their sales still fell
Electric cars just hit a record share of China’s market. Their sales still fell

New energy vehicles took a record 65.1% of Chinese passenger car sales in July, but NEV volumes fell about 2% year on year, a seventh straight monthly decline, while the total market dropped 18%. Geely’s Xingyuan was the bestseller and BYD’s best perfo…

China would not let Meta keep Manus. Users have until 24 August to save their work
China would not let Meta keep Manus. Users have until 24 August to save their work

Manus is leaving Meta. The Chinese agent startup told users this week that it will “soon return to operating as an independent company”. That is not a change of heart. Beijing refused to let the acquisition stand, and Meta chose not to fight it. The un…

The man who built Qwen has a new lab, and the Shanghai government is an investor
The man who built Qwen has a new lab, and the Shanghai government is an investor

The researcher who led Alibaba’s Qwen models has started his own company. Junyang Lin announced Pragmatik Labs on X on Tuesday evening, five months after walking out of Alibaba. The lab is based in Shanghai and works on what Lin calls next-generation a…

China bets on AI weather forecasting as extreme storms close in
China bets on AI weather forecasting as extreme storms close in

As Typhoon Dolphin bore down on China’s coast this week, the country’s bet on artificial intelligence to read the skies looked less like a research curiosity and more like national infrastructure. Extreme weather is intensifying, the cost of getting a …

Oil giant rips out gas pumps for BYD’s 1,500 kW EV chargers
Oil giant rips out gas pumps for BYD’s 1,500 kW EV chargers

Sinopec, China’s biggest fuel retailer, just gutted one of its Shanghai gas stations and swapped the pumps for BYD’s 1,500 kW flash chargers.
And this wasn’t a case of bolting a couple of chargers onto the edge of the forecourt. Sinopec pulled the unde…