Theme: China

China: articles and notes where the país is a central actor.

Memory now decides the artificial intelligence (AI) race

The price of plain dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) rose 90% in one quarter as capacity moved to high-bandwidth memory (HBM). China advanced where nobody was looking — 10% of global DRAM, 14% of NAND (Not-And) flash and the most valuable company on the Shanghai exchange — while American export control aims at the previous generation’s bottleneck.

ChinaSouth KoreaUnited StatesNetherlandsSemiconductorsArtificial intelligence

21 Sep 2026

A near war over a report an artificial intelligence (AI) invented

Special forces were preparing to board a Chinese ship on the strength of a report a chatbot fabricated. The answer under negotiation between Washington and Beijing is a mechanism to warn before acting: a telephone rather than a rule about where AI may sit.

ChinaUnited StatesIranArtificial intelligenceDiplomacyDeterrence

21 Sep 2026

The blockade nobody would call a war

Customs inspection as a weapon: why the likeliest escalation over Taiwan is legal before it is military.

ChinaTaiwanUnited StatesTaiwan StraitDeterrence

20 Sep 2026

The rare-earth bottleneck is refining

Western dependency sits in the few plants that separate the elements, and China holds 91% of that refining.

ChinaUnited StatesMalaysiaCritical mineralsSupply chains

17 Sep 2026

What India learned from refusing to choose

Multi-alignment as statecraft, tested across three consecutive crises.

IndiaRussiaUnited StatesChinaMulti-alignmentSouth Asia

16 Sep 2026

Wire

The United States and Australia are investigating how components of F-35 fighter jets shipped from Australia to the United States for repair ended up diverted to Hong Kong as they crossed the Pacific, with some of the material still unaccounted for. The F-35 Joint Program Office at the US Department of Defense said it was “aware of a shipment issue of unserviceable F-35 Lightning II components” and that it was working with US authorities and industry partners “to retrieve these components, investigate the incident, and place safeguards to avoid a future occurrence,” according to the South China Morning Post and Defense News. The case surfaced in a Politico report on September 19, 2026; the shipment included a cockpit canopy, which carries a thin radar-absorbent layer, and the components were carried by a third-party company hired by Lockheed Martin, which manages the programme’s international spare-parts pool. On September 22, 2026, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles confirmed that Canberra is helping with the investigation: “We are examining very much everything that has occurred at the Australian end,” he said, according to ABC News. Marles played down the episode: “my understanding is that there is a sense of comfort, that we’re not talking about sensitive equipment here, or sensitive parts.” The US House Armed Services Committee is aware of the case and has received several briefings on it, committee spokesperson Heather Vaughan told Bloomberg. There is no public evidence that China obtained or inspected the material, and the Department of Defense has not said what exactly went missing. Australia operates 72 F-35s and has no facility able to repair the canopies. Hong Kong’s government said it does not comment on individual cases.

22 Sep · 05:05

Alibaba unveiled the Zhenwu V900 accelerator on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at its Apsara conference in Hangzhou, billing it as China’s most powerful artificial intelligence chip. According to chief executive Eddie Wu, the chip delivers three times the performance of the previous-generation Zhenwu M890 and can be clustered up to 500,000 units to train frontier models; it is built by the company’s T-Head division and is scheduled for mass production in the first quarter of 2027. Wu also set a target for Alibaba Cloud to operate more than 20 gigawatts of global data center capacity by 2032, citing demand he said is growing exponentially, and the company plans to train a model with 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters. T-Head has delivered 560,000 chips across the Zhenwu family, with more than 400 external customers, and the group has committed more than US$ 53 billion to artificial intelligence over three years, raising about US$ 10.2 billion in August 2026 in a follow-on share sale in Hong Kong. Performance, capacity and timing are the company’s own targets and claims.

22 Sep · 04:35