Taiwan has committed to driving hundreds of billions of dollars of extra investment into America’s chip industry as part of a US trade deal announced on Thursday, with the island’s biggest semiconductor producer already moving to buy more land in the US state of Arizona. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) – the world’s largest contract chipmaker – confirmed on Thursday that it had bought a second tract of land in Arizona. The 365-hectare (901-acre) plot nearly doubles the...

China accounted for more than four out of five humanoid robot installations globally in 2025, driven by domestic start-ups AgiBot and Unitree Robotics, as mass production and commercialisation accelerated, according to a report by Counterpoint Research. A total of 16,000 humanoid robots were installed globally in 2025, mainly for data collection and research, as well as in the logistics, manufacturing, and automotive sectors, according to Counterpoint data released on Wednesday. The market was...

Chinese companies are expected to shoulder higher costs for deploying advanced chips from the US, owing to a new 25 per cent tariff imposed by Washington on select high-performance semiconductors, according to analysts. The administration of US President Donald Trump on Wednesday said the new import duties on advanced artificial intelligence chips covered Nvidia’s H200 and Advanced Micro Devices’ MI325X graphics processing units, as well as their equivalent products and derivatives. According to...

Elon Musk’s platform X on Wednesday announced measures to prevent its AI chatbot Grok from undressing images of real people, following global backlash over its generation of sexualised photos of women and children. The announcement came after California’s attorney general launched an investigation into Musk’s xAI - the developer of Grok - over the sexually explicit material and multiple countries either blocked access to the chatbot or launched their own probes. X said it would “geoblock the...

Chinese chip designer Montage Technology is set to enlist Alibaba Group Holding and JPMorgan Asset Management among the key investors in its upcoming Hong Kong listing, according to people familiar with the matter, in a sign of promising demand for the city’s latest share sale related to artificial intelligence. Alibaba and the JPMorgan Chase asset manager were participating as cornerstone investors, which get guaranteed allocation in exchange for holding the shares for a period of time, the...

China has opened an antitrust investigation into Trip.com Group, the country’s largest online travel services provider, weeks before hundreds of millions of people on the mainland go away on holiday during the Lunar New Year break. The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) on Wednesday said the group – operator of namesake platform Trip.com, Skyscanner, Ctrip, Qunar and Dutch site Travix – abused its “dominant market position” and engaged in “monopolistic practices”. The...

Generative artificial intelligence service Kling AI in December recorded more than US$20 million in sales, which corresponded to an annualised revenue run rate (ARR) of US$240 million, according to Chinese operator Kuaishou Technology. That was more than double Kling AI’s US$100 million ARR in March last year, according to a statement on Tuesday from Bejing-based Kuaishou. ARR is a financial metric used to project a company’s 12-month revenue by extrapolating earnings from a shorter period, like...