Chinese AI chipmaker Hygon plots expansion from data centres to robotics

When Chinese artificial intelligence developers want to train their next-generation frontier models, they all face the same daunting wall: they cannot legally buy the world’s most powerful AI chips. However, the country’s tech giants and start-ups have still managed to quietly keep pace with global rivals. Their secret is an elusive workaround: moving heavy training workloads across borders through the cloud. By setting up proxy entities in foreign jurisdictions, domestic firms have for years...

Europe faces a fourth-quarter jet fuel deficit, even as it turns to far-flung suppliers including South Korea, which is set to boost its jet exports to Europe to a four-year high in September, according to analysts and shipping data. The continent has been importing more jet fuel from nations including Nigeria, the United States and Canada since the outbreak of the Iran war over half a year ago, which hit Middle Eastern supplies and cut off around half of Europe’s jet imports. Europe remains...

The Philippines’ rise to upper-middle-income status was supposed to mark a new phase for one of Southeast Asia’s most closely watched emerging economies. Instead, analysts say the milestone has done little to shield the country from short-term pressures weighing on growth: sluggish public spending, delayed infrastructure, high living costs and the fallout from investigations into alleged irregularities in flood control projects. Those strains have left the Philippines looking like a regional...

In early July, China fired a test missile from a nuclear submarine into the South Pacific for the first time, a weapon capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Washington and Canberra were livid. The Pacific has long been the exclusive testing ground for such long-range missiles from the United States. How dare China! The reaction from Pacific island states was more measured. While leaders from Tuvalu, Palau and the Solomon Islands strongly criticised the test, the 18-member Pacific Islands Forum...

For more than five years, U Kyaw Moe Tun has refused to give up his United Nations post and a sandstone townhouse on the Upper East Side.

Chinese artificial intelligence company Z.ai is facing a trust crisis after developers discovered that its coding assistant tool, ZCode, was silently uploading local workspace data to external servers without explicit user consent. Even though the company, also known as Zhipu AI, apologised and patched the vulnerability, developers said the incident was likely to weaken its reputation, especially at a time when cybersecurity is becoming a central issue in the AI industry. The issue came to light...

The recent opening of a new road bridge between North Korea and Russia may look like a modest infrastructure project. In reality, the 1km stretch across the Tumen River carries implications far beyond the movement of vehicles between two border towns. For China, it is a reminder that its influence over North Korea is no longer as secure as it once appeared and that Russia may be increasingly capable of challenging Beijing’s interests on its northeastern periphery. The bridge, inaugurated on...

North Korea fired two missiles off its eastern coast on Sunday, its second set of tests in roughly a week and days after Pyongyang accused the US of driving tensions on the Korean peninsula through a series of military drills. Nearly three ‌hours after launching a short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) towards the East Sea, or Sea of Japan, on Sunday afternoon, North Korea ‌fired a similar missile, according to South Korea’s defence ministry. If the subsequent launch is confirmed to be a ballistic...

The government is exploring nuclear power options to guard against global energy shocks. One proposal is to switch on a plant in Bataan that has been mothballed for 40 years.

Chinese memory chip giant Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT) said on Sunday that it adopted its new-generation technology platform for mass production, narrowing the advantage of global leaders including Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix in manufacturing nodes. CXMT’s fifth-generation technology platform, dubbed G5, achieved a “quantum leap” in storage density, with the number of dies produced per wafer increasing by at least 50 per cent from the previous generation while maintaining better...

The prospect of United States, Chinese and Russian leaders meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Shenzhen this November has revived the Yalta analogy. Talk of a Trump-Xi-Putin summit – echoing the 1945 meeting that reshaped the world – surfaced during the first Trump term, and speculation returned last year with the 80th anniversary of the second world war. No such meeting occurred. However, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted the two presidents back-to-back in...