Companies, products, and big moves
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China's AI economy is consolidating fast — its flagship GPU maker is nearly break-even and heading for Hong Kong, a startup is open-sourcing a small vision model that out-perceives far bigger rivals, and Alibaba is testing a new way to charge for open weights. Moore Threads,
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China's first fully domestic 100,000-card AI supercluster is now live. The National Development and Reform Commission confirmed that the Sugon-built Dawning 8000 is in operation at the National Supercomputing Internet's Zhengzhou core node, running 100,000 domestically produced AI accelerator cards across the
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Chinese AI-infrastructure startup MagicShape (魔形智能) has closed its A-round just three months after its Pre-A, a sign of how fast capital is consolidating around the "token factory" model that powers much of the current open-model boom. "Token super-factory" MagicShape announced an
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The humanoid robot industry gets its first public-market scorecard: Unitree Robotics, the Hangzhou maker of the backflipping G1 and the robot dog that became a meme, has priced a Shanghai IPO that makes it the first humanoid company to list in mainland China. Unitree Robotics priced its Shanghai STAR
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Leopold Aschenbrenner's hedge fund, weeks removed from a near-death margin-call spiral, is back to writing nine-figure checks — this time into the machines that make the chips. Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness has poured $400 million into Source Foundry, a stealth chip-manufacturing startup taking
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The AI cost squeeze has reached Europe's biggest software company: SAP has frozen most hiring and travel to pay for AI — and unlike a typical belt-tightening, this one is explicitly pro-AI. SAP, Europe's largest software company, suspended most travel and hiring last month because
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Two moves in the last day quietly extended what AI assistants can do at work: OpenAI is pulling presentation-making talent into ChatGPT, and Anthropic's Claude Code sessions just learned to talk to each other. OpenAI has acquired NextSlide, a year-old startup whose AI turns prompts, notes,
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The AI power arms race just crossed a new line: Amazon is behind what could become the largest fossil-fuel power plant ever built in the US, and it exists for one customer — Amazon's own AI data centers. Amazon has confirmed it acquired GW Ranch, a site in
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The AI boom has turned South Korea into the world's memory powerhouse — and this week's Bloomberg and Economist features show it's now reshaping the country's social order, from who counts as marriage material to how the government taxes windfalls. South Korea'
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A dating app with 65 engineers just told Wall Street that AI did the work of 200 extra engineers in ten months. The claim — and the way it was measured — is the clearest look yet at how AI is reshaping software economics from the inside. It is also a case
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The frontier-lab talent drain finally has a number on it: an Amplemarket tally now circulating on LinkedIn and Reddit counts 37 OpenAI and Anthropic alumni who left to found companies this year. The headline number is less interesting than what the founders are building — because the sharpest bets all
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China's frontier race goes maximalist: ByteDance starts one of the largest training runs ever attempted, Cloudflare rebuilds the browser for agents, and the evidence that chatbots fail people in crisis keeps piling up. ByteDance has begun pre-training an AI model with up to 10 trillion parameters — roughly