4 entries tagged china. All writing.
TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 The Chip China Banned Itself Into Building On September 22, Alibaba's chip unit T-Head unveiled the Zhenwu V900 at the company's Apsara Conference in Hangzhou — 216GB of on-package memory, a 1,200GB/s interconnect, and clusters scaling to 500,000 units, which CEO Eddie Wu called "the most powerful AI chip in China today." The obvious story is the timing, one day before Xi Jinping landed in Washington for his first US state visit in three years. The more interesting story is who actually kept Nvidia's H200 out of China — and it wasn't only Washington. WORLD · SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 The Chip Doesn't Have to Cross a Border On September 18, House Select Committee on China chairman John Moolenaar wrote to Trump urging him to close the "cloud services loophole" in chip export controls. Less than a week before Xi Jinping's first state visit to the White House since 2015, the letter's real weight falls on a second ask: curbing sales of the equipment that makes the chips in the first place. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 21, 2026 The Most-Downloaded AI Models in the World Are Alibaba's On 18 September Alibaba's Qwen team shipped Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash — one model that takes text, images, audio and video, holds a million tokens of context, and decides for itself which parts of a two-hour video are worth watching. The release is the news, but the program behind it is the story: Qwen passed three billion downloads this summer, more than Google's and Meta's open models combined. Here is what "omnimodal" actually means, what the 26 percent is measuring, and why a company most people know for e-commerce is a serious AI lab. WORLD · SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 The Summer of Truth, and the Things With Dates Ursula von der Leyen's 2026 State of the Union names a war on the continent, a closed Strait of Hormuz that has cost Europe €90 billion, a €1-billion-a-day trade deficit with China and a Russian drone attack in Leipzig — and the two proposals that leave the hall with a date attached are a Heatwave Plan and a ban on social media for children. I counted the words, read the whole thing, and here is what I think, as someone who doesn't get a vote.