China called off its ice-hunting Moon shot a day before launch
China called off its ice-hunting Moon shot a day before launch

China called off its most ambitious Moon mission the day before it was due to fly. The announcement runs to a single sentence. Chang’e 7 does not meet the conditions for launch, the China Manned Space Agency said on Sunday. It cannot go ahead in this y…

Alibaba shares fell 8.4%. Then Joe Tsai and Eddie Wu went shopping
Alibaba shares fell 8.4%. Then Joe Tsai and Eddie Wu went shopping

Alibaba’s two most senior executives bought about $15.3m of their own company’s shares on Monday. The stock had just fallen further than at any point in more than a year. Chairman Joe Tsai and chief executive Eddie Wu spent a combined HK$120m, accordin…

Europe’s EV share hit 25% in July as sales jumped 51%
Europe’s EV share hit 25% in July as sales jumped 51%

Electric cars took a 25% share of European registrations in July, with sales up 51% year on year against 4.1% growth for the market as a whole. Chinese brands took 34% of plug-in hybrid sales, a segment EU countervailing duties do not currently cover. …

Inner Mongolia signs $27bn of AI computing projects
Inner Mongolia signs $27bn of AI computing projects

Inner Mongolia signed 12 green computing projects worth 186.46 billion yuan on Saturday, about $27.49bn. It also broke ground on a platform to sell Chinese AI services abroad. The state news agency Xinhua reported both from Hohhot, the regional capital…

Temu-Owner PDD beats profit estimates as revenue growth slows to 8%
Temu-Owner PDD beats profit estimates as revenue growth slows to 8%

PDD Holdings posted adjusted quarterly earnings of 19.33 yuan per share against estimates of 18.51, with revenue up 8% to 112.4bn yuan, or $16.6bn, missing forecasts. Shares rose about 3.5% premarket as European regulatory pressure on Temu continues to…

Taiwan indicts Nvidia manager over chips shipped to China
Taiwan indicts Nvidia manager over chips shipped to China

Taiwanese prosecutors have indicted a senior Nvidia manager and eight others over an alleged scheme that shipped 74 servers containing B300 chips to China via Japan and Indonesia. They are seeking five years for forgery and breach of trust. The first k…

His headphones kept cutting out, so he read the AliExpress code
His headphones kept cutting out, so he read the AliExpress code

A developer worked out why his Bluetooth headphones kept dropping his music, and the answer was on the AliExpress homepage. The Register reported the story on Monday, drawing on the developer’s own account and a follow-up from a Firefox engineer. Conno…

Thomson Reuters built its own model on a Chinese open base
Thomson Reuters built its own model on a Chinese open base

Thomson Reuters launched its first proprietary large language model on Monday. The company calls it Thomson. It says it spent $40mn on talent and compute to train the model, and that it began from what its announcement describes as “a strong open-sourc…

Galbot Robots complete 100 consecutive rallies against a tennis champion
Galbot Robots complete 100 consecutive rallies against a tennis champion

Galbot says its robot completed more than 100 consecutive autonomous tennis rallies against former world number 15 Zheng Jie at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. The rally count, the autonomy claim and the robot’s identity all rest on the comp…

A humanoid robot just beat Usain Bolt’s 100m record, and roboticists are unimpressed for good reason
A humanoid robot just beat Usain Bolt’s 100m record, and roboticists are unimpressed for good reason

A robot built by Beijing’s X-Humanoid ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games, beating Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second record. Roboticists point out that speed on a known course is far easier for a machine than folding laundry. A mach…