Microsoft told Google it was overreacting in 2010. It has spent five years quietly leaving China
Microsoft told Google it was overreacting in 2010. It has spent five years quietly leaving China

Corporate filings show the closures, Reuters reported in an exclusive. The revenue figure is the one that explains the rest. China accounted for 1.5% of global revenue as of 2024. Microsoft has no current plan to exit. It has simply stopped growing the…

Apple trained its own AI model for China, and handed the brain to Alibaba
Apple trained its own AI model for China, and handed the brain to Alibaba

Apple has trained its own large language model for the Chinese market with Alibaba’s support, a striking break from the company’s usual habit of leaning on other people’s models. According to a Reuters report, Apple is the first foreign firm Beijing ha…

DeepSeek built a Claude Code rival, then quadrupled its prices
DeepSeek built a Claude Code rival, then quadrupled its prices

Start with the money, because it is the part every developer noticed. From 16 August, a million output tokens through DeepSeek-V4-Pro costs $3.96 at peak, up from $0.87. V4-Flash goes from $0.28 to $1.32, Bloomberg reported. Off-peak rates are half the…

Volkswagen can build a $17,175 car. Just not in Europe
Volkswagen can build a $17,175 car. Just not in Europe

Start with the Volkswagen, because it is the one that should give Europe pause. SAIC Volkswagen, the joint venture with China’s state-owned SAIC Motor, opened preorders for the ID. Era 5S saloon this week. The introductory price is 115,900 yuan, which …

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…