Tech

Five stories from late September, traced to where the paper trail stops: Korea's export record, Nvidia's Hugging Face 8-K, a US-China AI channel, the UN on AI, and rising births.

Huawei's CANN is open source under a license barring software for non-Ascend chips. Inside China's second CUDA, and the two links still outside it: pre-training compute and 5nm capacity.

Samsung Electronics' union branch revealed that 84% of survey respondents oppose the government's roughly $290 billion (₩400 trillion) semiconductor megaproject in Gwangju. Government, management, the union and shareholders are all reading the same national project in sharply different ways.

Nvidia shipped roughly a billion RISC-V cores in 2024, then announced it would run CUDA on the open standard. We break down how royalty-free instruction sets and open software stacks are trying to route around CUDA's lock-in. Part 2 of the Semiconductor Sovereignty series.

US AI-chip export controls split into three layers in the first half of 2026 — January easing, a May crackdown on circumvention, and a pending bill. Nvidia erased China from its guidance and still posted a record $81.6 billion quarter. A look at the export policy that both shields and cages it.

AMD's MI325X matches or beats Nvidia on memory and bandwidth — yet Nvidia's 86-92% share holds. The real moat is CUDA, 20 years in the making. Part 1 of 4.

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 and xAI's Grok 4.5 landed a day apart with opposite bets — premium speed versus rock-bottom price. What the specs, the Cerebras-vs-Nvidia hardware war, and a White House denial mean for developers.

Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 5, its mid-tier agent model, on June 30. Behind the 'Opus-class power, budget price' headline sits a tokenizer catch and a three-horse race that's only half real. Here's what developers should actually run the numbers on.

IBM has unveiled 'nanostack,' the world's first sub-1nm (0.7nm) chip research. Some say it adds a decade to Moore's Law; others say a lab demo is a long way from a fab. Either way, mass production isn't IBM's job.

Samsung and SK unveiled a chip and AI investment package worth thousands of trillions of won on June 29. The headline number swings wildly by outlet, but the real contest isn't capital — it's water and power.

Waymo's new Ojai robotaxi isn't just a vehicle upgrade. It's the company's most serious attempt yet at cracking the cost problem that has kept autonomous vehicles from scaling. Here's what's really at stake.

Snowflake's new $6 billion AWS contract is about more than cloud spending. It signals a shift in AI infrastructure—away from Nvidia GPUs and toward cheaper, homegrown chips for the agent era.