DeepSeek is close to raising at least 80 billion yuan, or about $12bn, in a new funding round, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday. Tencent and the battery maker CATL have committed some of the largest sums, according to people familiar with the matter …
Reflection AI, the Nvidia-backed startup founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, has unveiled Beam, its first open-weight model. Beam is built for coding, reasoning and agentic work. Reflection will release its weights later this month, the comp…
Gas cars are now a minority of the world’s new car sales. Gasoline-only vehicles made up 49% of global new-vehicle sales in the first half of 2026, down from 73% in 2021, according to Mobility Global data first reported by Nikkei.
It’s the first tim…
China’s industry ministry and six other agencies set 2030 as the date for the first large-scale use of all-solid-state batteries, though CATL’s chairman rates the technology four out of nine and calls million-vehicle use before 2030 very unlikely. ProL…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked Donald Trump to sanction the Russian and Chinese companies building Russia’s answer to Starlink, the Financial Times reported. He has raised it with Trump several times, including at a recent meeting in …
US authorities have arrested a California man accused of smuggling more than $300mn of computer servers packed with AI chips to China, the Justice Department said on Thursday. Greg Lui, 38, of San Gabriel, also known as Yiu Kong Lui, was arrested on We…
Tencent has signed a five-year lease to use about 100,000 advanced AI chips from Oracle. People familiar with the matter told the Financial Times about the deal. The chips, which are not available in China, sit in several Oracle data centres in South-E…
Ford chief executive Jim Farley said it is too late for Europe to fend off Chinese carmakers and that the United States should take its time deciding. Ford’s own answer in Europe is a Valencia joint venture in which Geely holds 34% and will build two o…
MI5 has told UK universities to review any work with the China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI). It says the institute funds research for China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). More than 100 UK-linked academics have worked on its projec…
In 2017, OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever proposed auctioning the rights to the company’s future AGI to governments, including the US, China and Russia. Kevin Roose reports the plan in an excerpt from his book, published by The Atlan…