china

While we debate how much electricity AI needs, China already has a data center that runs on clean energy

by

The first data center Artificial Intelligence Powered by China’s Wind Power. This is an innovative facility in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, in the northwestern part of the country, and has a renewable energy supply that allows it to operate using 100% clean electricity. This means everything a milestone for the Asian country and also for the global industry if we take into account the debate that sparks the enormous environmental impact of these infrastructures. Less emissions into the atmosphere. According to what the media shares South China Morning Postthe IA data center’s renewable energy plant generates 4.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, reducing carbon emissions into the atmosphere by 3.65 million tons. Furthermore, the installation reaches a 1.15 in the energy use efficiency indicator (PUE), which measures the entire power of a facility and the energy expenditure of data centers. To put this in context, the industry’s average PUE has been 1.56 over the last 5 years, according to the Global Data Center Survey 2025 by Uptime Institute. A score of 1.0 would be a perfect PUE, according to this organization. Data in the East, Computing in the West. The implementation of this AI data center is part of a broader strategic plan that the Asian country is carrying out to reinforce the infrastructure that supports the development of AI using renewable energy. With the name in English Eastern Data, Western Computing (EDWC), this national megaproject seeks to move data processing from the more developed eastern areas of China to the rural western regions, which have much better and abundant environmental conditions for renewable energy sources. This would be the case of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. In this way, the Asian giant plans to face the increase in energy demand in the coming yearswhich may be double in 2030 according to some forecasts. Voracious consumption. The AI data centersdespite being very similar to traditional data centers, work with a greater processing demand, which makes them true energy guzzlers. The ICT consulting company Gartner predicts that the electricity consumption of this type of locations will reach 565 TWh this 2026. Regarding its impact, a recent study carried out by Allianz reveals that the emissions associated with this type of centers reached 286 megatons of carbon dioxide in 2025 and their carbon footprint has been 57% larger than what the IEA had originally calculated. Among the resources that have been used the most, electricity consumption is at the top, responsible for 76% of that footprint. For this reason, the report suggests that moving towards a greener AI will depend, above all, on transforming the energy systems that feed it and betting on renewable resources such as wind energywhich has hardly any water or carbon footprint. And here, what are we doing? The “green” outpost What China is taking is of enormous interest for the rest of the world, especially for our continent if we take into account the decarbonization objectives that come from Brussels. The European Union has already contemplated this type of data centers in some of its general energy regulations, such as the Energy Efficiency Directive (EU) 2023/1791which in its article 12 establishes that those centers with more than 500 kW will be obliged to make their energy consumption public. Other standards, such as Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364seek to unify a regime of common assessment for the more than 3,000 installations of this type that exists in the EU. Although there is no shortage of those who see in this regulatory will a reason why Europe could be left behind In the technological race, the truth is that the energy efficiency of data centers, and especially in AI centers, can make a difference. That’s how he thinks Hongpeng LeiHead of the Mitigation Division of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), for whom betting on more sustainable centers is not an obstacle, but “the path to a resilient and competitive digital infrastructure”. Spain, for its part, is one of the European leaders in renewable energy with more than 55% of the electricity produced with this origin in 2025. This obvious advantage gives it a great potential to build a green-powered next-generation data infrastructure. However, it is worth asking whether the Spanish network will be able to keep pace with the installation of these centers and, consequently, satisfy what is clearly going to be a huge energy demand. For now, The project that Microsoft plans to build in Aragon will consume more energy than the entire autonomous communityan example of the energy challenge that accompanies the development of AI. Image | Paul Hanaoka Xataka | “Only behind the United States”: China has achieved a until recently chimerical position in intelligent computing

the price of China starting to manufacture its own lithography

by

ASML has suffered a hard blow. Just a few hours after The Information revealed that a state-backed Chinese company had begun mass manufacturing its own immersion deep ultraviolet (UVP) lithography machines, ASML shares plummeted. They fell until 6.5% in Amsterdamits lowest level since the beginning of June, while on Wall Street they reached fall 6.3%. However, when ASML sneezes other companies catch a cold. And Applied Materials, Lam Research and KLA Corp, the other large Western suppliers of equipment for manufacturing integrated circuits, were left between 4% and 7% in the same stock market session, dragged by the same underlying fear: that China, after years of trying, will finally begin to solve the link of the semiconductor chain that most resisted him. International media have not yet confirmed the name of this company, although several of them claim that it resides in Shanghai (China), so it is probably Shanghai Yuliangsheng Technology, an emerging company linked to Huawei and YesCarrier. This simply means that the ecosystem of suppliers that China has been weaving around Huawei in recent years is also beginning to bear fruit in photolithography. Be that as it may, the market has already decided that the threat, although incipient, is real. ASML’s China business suffers This setback in the stock markets comes at a bad time for ASML’s business in China. Its sales in this Asian country represented 19% of your income during the first quarter of this year, and fell to 14% in the second. Even so, this Dutch company presented some solid quarterly results: net sales of 9,326 million euros in the second quarter, 21% more than a year ago, and a net profit of 2,918 million, 27% more with a gross margin of 54%, slightly above the 53.7% of the previous year. ASML still plans to deliver about 130 immersion systems worldwide during 2026 Its CEO, Christophe Fouquet, even raised its net income forecast for 2026 in mid-July to a range of between 43,000 and 45,000 million euros relying on a demand for chips artificial intelligence (AI) that is still triggered. This simply means that ASML comes to this setback with the wind in your core businessEUV lithography, a segment in which China neither manufactures nor can buy its most advanced machines. The immersion UVP, on the other hand, can manufacture it, which has precisely caused this Monday’s scare. On the other hand, we must not overlook that ASML still plans to deliver some 130 immersion systems worldwide during 2026, a volume that the Chinese company cannot even remotely match with its five units planned for this year. Even so, the simple possibility that China will no longer need ASML to produce the less advanced chips, the ones needed by cars, household appliances and much of the world’s industry, is enough for the market to begin to foresee the arrival of a different future. Image | ASML More information | Bloomberg | Blockonomi In Xataka | TSMC raises its bet in the US: there are already 265,000 million dollars for 2 nm

In China they have had an idea to defuse the demographic bomb that shadows their future: “top blankets” of love

by

Shanghai is a powerful financial center, with a booming stock market and hundreds of multinational headquarters. However, if one walks around on a Sunday afternoon People’s Parkin the Huangpu district, you will come across a market that seems straight out of another time. And not because their stalls sell crafts, spices or livestock. What we will see are parents determined to sell your unmarried children like great matches with which to start a family. Their goal is to capture the interest of other potential in-laws or marriage agency employees hired by other families. It may seem picturesque, but it is further proof of the demographic bomb that takes shape in China. A marriage market? Exact. And as a good market it is, we will find supply, demand, brochures and people committed to give notoriety to your ‘merchandise’although these are single children of matchmaking age who in many cases do not even know that their parents are there ‘selling’ them. That is the peculiar image that can be found on Sunday afternoons in the People’s Park from Shanghai (Rénmín Gōngyuán), where people meet who are looking for couples to start families with, parents concerned about the sentimental life of their children and agencies specialized in finding matches. OUCH! #China‘s population falls again as births drop to lowest rate since 1949 communist revolution. The number of new babies born was just 7.92mln in 2025, a decline of 1.62mln, or 17% YoY. The latest birth numbers show that the slight tick upward in 2024 was not a lasting… pic.twitter.com/QpUO7tRLFk — Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) January 19, 2026 Is it something new? No. There are references that go back to more than a decade. In fact, it is believed that the Shanghai marriage market started in 2004when parents began to act as matchmakers in the same place where their children gathered to attend dance classes or play sports. Shanghai is not the only place in China where these peculiar ‘love fairs’ are organized. We can also find them in parks Beijing, Canton either ChengduFor example. However, neither their popularity nor their antiquity has caused the interest they arouse among foreign tourists to decline. And what are those markets like? A quick Google search brings up articles on the topic of The Economist, South China Morning Post, The Paris Review either The Worldto name just a handful of examples. They are all recent and they all tell their readers the spectacle of the Shanghai market with a mixture of fascination and exoticism. And it is more than understandable. At fairs like the one in Huangpu you can find parents loaded with copies of the sentimental resume of their children, sheets in which they report their height, age, hobbies and (most importantly) if they have good salaries or a home they own. These leaves are hung from poles or open umbrellas, which recently led a reporter from The World to define it as a “top love blanket”. Why is it important? The fact that there are parks where suitors meet and, above all, parents concerned that their 35-year-old son is still single or a 38-year-old daughter is the only one in her group of friends who has not yet had children is striking. Just like the fact that there are agencies that They charge up to 1,000 euros for placing their clients’ resumes in the best places in the park, those where they will have the best chance of finding a suitor. However, if ‘marriage markets’ like the one in Shanghai generate so much interest, it is because of their social background. Cultural issues aside, they connect with one of the main headaches that Xi Jinping’s Government has been dealing with for years: the ‘demographic bomb’ that takes shape in China. Although for decades the problem was overpopulation and high birth rates, which led him to embrace until 2015 the ‘one child’ policyright now the challenge is another, of the opposite nature: birth rate falls, population falls, society ages and increasingly common to see single-person households. What do the data tell us? That parents who go to Parque del Pueblo with their children’s curriculum under their arms are the manifestation of a larger phenomenon. The Chinese authorities estimate that there are more than 240 million of single adults and there are studies that talk about 125 million of single-person households, which represents a radical break with the traditional concept of home in which up to four generations lived together under the same roof. The problem, after decades of application of the ‘one-child policy’, is that the gender division of this mass of singles is not balanced: there are 30 million more of men than women. As a backdrop, a nation in which demographic indicators are beginning to paint a worrying picture. In 2025 the country scored its lowest birth rate and saw the population shrink for the fourth year in a row. This trend has contributed, among other things, to China have lost the crown of the most populous country on the planet, but above all it worries about its implications social and economic. Is it only seen in the markets? Not at all. Marriage markets are part of a much larger and more complex mosaic that demonstrates how demographics (in their various manifestations) are becoming an obsession for part of Chinese society. And also his Government. In addition to fairs like the one in Shanghai, initiatives have been emerging in the country of all kinds for promote birth: matchmaking programs, subsidies…the Government has even gone so far as to make more expensive the price of condoms or activated, through the Communist Party (CCP), a kind of Tinder for young people. Images | Wikipedia (Jpbowen) and Luca Casartelli (Flickr) In Xataka | With the birth rate at levels not seen since 1939, a reality is emerging in Barcelona: the native population is now a minority

China is already experiencing a fever for ultra-technological electric caravans and the reason is simple: they are better than combustion ones

by

China wants to attract tourists. And he wants his tourists to bet on the national tourism. The objective, evidently, is to attract money and promote internal consumption in the country. So much so that in 2025 tourism generated 16% more income than the previous year, according to data from the country’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The movement, of course, has promoted the use of the train or the plane. But it has had an unexpected effect: the fever of electric caravans. “To take a nap”. It is, according to Daniel Wu, global director of brand and marketing at XPeng, what some people do when they finish their work hours. “Many people go to their cars to take a one-hour nap. After work, they stay in the car for an hour before returning home, doing things they like—for example, playing—simply because it is a very comfortable space,” he explains in words reported by Bloomberg. And the American media has focused on the Chinese camping fever. Since the Covid-19 crisis, this type of tourism has spread throughout the country as it offers an alternative to much more expensive hotels and adds the flexibility inherent to this type of tourism. The reasons for prioritizing camping tourism are exactly the same ones that we have defended in Europe and that have fired these types of proposals since the confinements due to the coronavirus crisis. The difference is that, in the Asian country, manufacturers are specializing in making the interior of the car its own space where the wheels are the addition. In Xataka Spain changes the rules of the game for motorhomes: they will be able to park where any car parks best electric. The big difference is that a good part of this fever is being channeled through fully electric or extended range vehicles. These types of vehicles allow functions such as “camping” or “sleep” modes to be incorporated, making life easier for the user who finds greater flexibility in this type of vehicle. In fact, the chinese media themselves They highlight that the boom is concentrating on models that offer more “high quality and comfort” options. According to their data, in 2022 this business moved 113.47 billion yuan but in 2025 it reached 250 billion yuan. A good part of this result lies in the fact that users increasingly opt for this type of vehicle when they have to rent them. To understand the fever for this type of vehicle, in ChinaDaily They reported that orders for “new energy” vehicles (as they call electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles there) are growing at a rate 10 times higher year after year and the rental period is increasingly longer. In Xataka Pebble has created the mother of all electric caravans. It parks itself and has a propulsion system A substantial advantage. Both in Bloomberg like in chinese media like People They highlight that these electric caravans are more sought after because their huge battery expands everything that can be done with the car. Users rateFor example, being able to carry appliances and all kinds of cooking utensils that only require a gigantic battery on wheels. There are some that even use 4K projectors inside so that passengers can enjoy wherever they go. A good example of this is this caravan that they collected in esquire with the interior space divided into two floors, refrigerator and induction hob, a compact toilet and karaoke, a highly sought after feature in all types of cars. Or this other one from Changan capable of fording rivers wave Geely Farizon. In addition, the possibilities for keeping the interior at a constant temperature are much greater than in a traditional vehicle, making it especially interesting for those who travel with pets. In Xataka It is no longer enough for luxury motorhomes to be huge. Now they have their own garage (with a car inside) The Millennials. One of the reasons given for this increase in the use of electric caravans is, evidently, the savings they represent compared to hotels. They are the travelers born from the 90s those who travel the most with this type of automobile. In fact, 53% of travelers were born during this decade. During May Day holidaysrentals of this type of car skyrocketed again but not only among caravans. And it is that car manufacturers are increasingly likely to include camping modes of use and sell a greater number of accessories to make these cars a realistic option with which to go camping without having to invest in a motorhome. In Xataka If the question is whether you can live in your caravan due to impossible housing prices, the answer is simple: it depends. Chargers everywhere. Of course, all this would not be possible if the charging network were not there. And the huge batteries that serve refrigerators and kitchens would no longer serve their main purpose (moving the car) if, for example, they did not have a dense network of chargers. They collect in Bloomberg that the country has filled gas stations and rest areas with plugs at a devilish rate. Growth is sustained at over 50% each year and there have already been more than 21 million chargers distributed throughout the country. Photo | Geely In Xataka | This image of a Tesla pulling a trailer hides a secret: an entire house in a ridiculous spaceeither (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news China is already experiencing a fever for ultra-technological electric caravans and the reason is simple: they are better than combustion ones was originally published in Xataka by Alberto de la Torre .

“The world doesn’t realize how much the AI ​​industry depends on scientists in China” Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

by

When someone as important to technology as Jensen Huang speaks, the bread rises. The CEO of Nvidia is a person who, although he is not known for giving headlines as controversial as his colleague Elon Musk, does say interesting and important things to understand the sector. At the beginning of the year he sat with Time to chat at length about the AI: whether or not it is a bubble, its impact or who is winning this race. In that interview China appeared and the commercial dispute that your company has with the Asian giant. There he made something clear: the world needs China more than the other way around. An example: his armyChina is achieving technological independence while its American counterpart increasingly resorts to Chinese imports. Thank China. When it comes to AI, Huang is clear: the providential weight of Chinese talent in the research and development of artificial intelligence. The CEO of Nvidia affirms that much of the world’s progress in artificial intelligence depends on Chinese researchers, and that the interdependence between the economies of China and the United States is greater than the public perceives. And he sums it up like this: “The idea that the United States can disengage from China is wrong.” Why it is important. Because the position of the boss of the most valuable company in the world, who is also American, collides with the toughest wing of the White House, which every now and then comes with new restrictions on the export of chips to China. If the industry’s reference supplier depends on symbiosis instead of separation, it is a warning to sailors for those who promote those obstacles in the form of laws that seek to limit Chinese access to the most advanced processors. Context. Note that this was not the first time that Jensen Huang argued for Chinese supremacy in AI. Already in May of last year at the Washington Forum claimed that 50% of the world’s Artificial Intelligence researchers are Chinese and that this data should influence “how we think about the game” of technological competition. Months later, in an interview with Citadel Securities collected by Fortuneinsisted that it is a mistake not to let these researchers build AI on American technology and that those policies that seek to harm China often also harm the United States. In detail. In that same interview Huang also made it clear that Taiwan will continue to be the centerpiece of AI chip manufacturing, despite the noise and interest from the White House in relocate production to the United States. In fact, in other interviews he has already clarified that manufacturing in America does not mean abandoning Taiwan, but rather spreading the risk. A complement. After all, You cannot abandon its highly refined production chain overnight as Trump intends. The small print. Jensen Huang has repeated the same speech on several occasions and scenarios, but as CEO of Nvidia we cannot lose sight of a reality: the commercial interest of his company. The Asian giant’s market share was enormous before export controls began, going from 95% to 0%. So Nvidia is the main one interested in defending openness. On the other hand, and although that 50% is real and matches different measurements Regarding talent in AI, this weight measures origin or training, not where these scientists work or what banner they have for the advances they achieve, since there is a large number who carry out their work in American universities and companies. In Xataka | “We chose the wrong technology”: Jensen Huang returns to Japan to acknowledge his debt to Sega 30 years later In Xataka | Jensen Huang enters the Samsung salary controversy: “Workers should earn as much as possible” Cover | Wikipedia and Gary Lerude on Flickr

The US is accusing China of plagiarizing Anthropic models. We have three problems with that accusation.

by

Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president of the United States, did not bite his tongue this week when claimed that “We have information indicating that Moonshoot AI distilled Fable from Anthropic for the development of its K3 model.” Or in other words, they accuse China of plagiarizing the American company’s advanced AI model. There are several fundamental problems with that accusation. Let’s see them. Fear of Kimi K3. This model has just burst onto the AI ​​scene with overwhelming force. Benchmarks show that Kimi K3 is one of the best AI models in the worldwith performance close to Fable 5 and GPT-5.6, the best public models from Anthropic and OpenAI. This milestone has triggered its popularity among users and companies, and also the alarms in Washington. The immediate consequence has in fact been political, because since the Trump Administration there is now open talk of sanctions for “theft of technology” if the accusation is confirmed. The accusation. In his text, Kratsios explains the supposed mechanism used by Moonshot AI to copy his model. It states that the Chinese startup would have built an internal platform to make mass queries to US models, changing access methods to avoid detection and then transferring its capabilities to Kimi K3. He also adds that the company has managed to access servers with Nvidia GB300 chips in countries outside China to avoid export restrictions. Where is the evidence? The first problem we have with that speech is that a key piece of that speech is missing from the start: Kratsios does not support this accusation with technical evidence. It does not provide usage records, it does not provide examples of prompts and responses, nor query patterns. Nor does it provide independent analyzes that any researcher could review. What we have right now is an official story and accusation, not a proven “infringement.” The controversy over distillation. The key word in that speech is “distillation.” In AI, distill a model It means training a new one using the responses of another. The “master” model answers thousands or millions of questions, and the “student” model learns to imitate its reasoning patterns at lower cost and size. The industry itself describes distillation as a legitimate and standard technique when applied to permitted or proprietary models. The red line appears when it is applied to third-party models, on a large scale and without permission, which according to the US Government is theft of intellectual property. But crime, what is called crime, is not. The second problem is that the statement and the accusation are not supported by any clear and defined legal framework. Neither the US nor China currently have a specific law that says under what conditions distilling a rival model is an intellectual property crime. You may violate an API’s terms of service or even end up obtaining sensitive information from companies, but there is no jurisprudence about it. In fact, until recently the debate in the US was about regulating US frontier models like Mythos, which were considered too dangerous. Suddenly the debate is now on sanctioning the distillation of models. Everything is moving too quickly, once again, to adapt the legislation. Hypocrisy made in USA. The third big problem we have with that accusation is that the big American models—including those at Anthropic—have been trained on massive data sets that mix websites, books, code, newspaper articles, and other materials of which a notable portion is protected by copyright. own Anthropic reached an agreement with justice these days for that reason, Meta has already discovered it stealing terabytes of copyrighted books to train your models. Double yardstick. In the US, AI companies defend themselves by arguing that That falls under “fair use” of the content, but the authors neither gave their permission nor charged for it. That same industry and that same Government that have made it normal to train models on other people’s content complain that a Chinese startup uses the outputs of its models to train its own. They are not identical practices, but the double standard is difficult to ignore. AI, once again, as a weapon. The Trump administration is taking this issue to another scale. By accusing Moonshot AI of using restricted chips and developing Kimi K3 by distilling Fable 5, he places distillation in the same box as industrial espionage or the theft of military secrets. AI is no longer a software product and becomes a strategic technological weapon. And there it is not so important to provide evidence or be technically precise: it is important that what China has done is an attack on its (former?) technological hegemony. If this type of accusation sounds familiar to you, you have a good memory. In Xataka | An AI model did not have access to the internet. So he thought it was better to have it and decided to hack something along the way

This is how China circumvents 2,000 ASML patents with a laser trick

by

The extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) is the tightest bottleneck in the entire semiconductor industry. Only one company in the world, the Dutch ASML, manufactures these machines, essential for producing integrated circuits below 7 nm, and since 2019 is prohibited from selling its most advanced models to China due to US pressure. Each device costs between 200 and 400 million dollars, and so far not a single Chinese client has managed to obtain one. A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, based at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, has built China’s first laser-plasma EUV light source platform. In front is Lin Nanformer ASML scientist and technical manager of its light sources for metrology, who returned to China in 2021 as part of a state talent attraction program. His team has chosen a path that deliberately avoids ASML’s method, as well as more than 2,000 of its patents. Qiu Yanfang, Chinese columnist specializing in semiconductors, has summed it up unambiguously: This patent rodeo is not just a legal maneuver; It’s genuine engineering. And it is this assessment, published just two weeks ago, that has once again put the focus on how far China has really come in its race for technological independence in lithography. The longest road to mass production The technical trick is this: while ASML generates EUV light by firing powerful carbon dioxide lasers at moving tin droplets (a method known as LPP), Lin Nan’s team uses a 1-micron solid-state laser that hits a solid tin target. In a published article In December 2024, Lin and his team were already arguing that this type of laser could replace carbon dioxide lasers as a next-generation source thanks to its compact size and higher conversion efficiency. However, Qiu Yanfang herself qualifies her initial enthusiasm. In the short term, he maintains, this solid-state source cannot shake ASML’s dominance, since the entire global semiconductor industry has built its supply chains, patents and engineering expertise around the carbon dioxide laser. Although Chinese technology achieves results in the laboratory, it still has a long way to go until achieve large scale production. The real value of Lin’s achievement, in any case, lies in laying the foundation and forging a research team that covers everything from theory to applied engineering. The Chinese Government aims to produce chips with this technology in 2028, although many analysts consider 2030 a more realistic date. This effort also coexists with another parallel and much more hermetic path. As revealed Reuters As of December 2025, China has assembled a working prototype EUV machine inside a high-security laboratory in Shenzhen, although it has not yet manufactured functional integrated circuits. Huawei coordinates this initiative, which involves thousands of engineers: the Harbin Institute of Technology is in charge of the light source, the Changchun Institute of Optics for the optical systems, and SMEE (Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment) of the final integration, with YesCarrier (the Chinese company backed by the Shenzhen Government and linked to Huawei) as another of the key actors. The Chinese Government aims to produce chips with this technology in 2028, although many of the analysts consider 2030 a more realistic date. For now, no Chinese prototype has proven to be capable of manufacturing commercial integrated circuits with its own UVE lithography, and doubts about the real speed of this advance have returned to the front line of information for a very different reason. US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has raised ASML senior managers the possibility that one of its SVU teams has reached China through clandestine channels, something that the Dutch company has denied emphatically: none of its 314 operational EUV machines in the world, nor is any of the 26 already withdrawn located in Chinese territory. China does not have its EUV machine yet. But, thanks to Lin Nan, it now has something that until recently it didn’t have either: its own path to try to build it. Image | ASML More information | Asia Times In Xataka | ASML’s new lithography equipment divides chipmakers. TSMC plans not to use it until 2030

Chinese AI geniuses could be billionaires in the US. The bad thing for the US is that they prefer to return to China

by

It is normal for someone to take six years to complete a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). A young man named Yang Zhilin got it in four, and immediately what had to happen happened: the big technology companies raffled him off. They wanted to sign him to Apple, Google or Meta, and both MIT and Stanford opened their doors to him. He could have stayed in the US and probably become a billionaire, but no. He returned to China, founded Moonshot AI, created the Kimi family of AI models and became one of the great new AI gurus of the Asian giant. His story is a good example of a big problem they are having in the US. A genius in the making. Yang graduated from the prestigious Chinese university of Tsinghua, and during his years at CMU he ended up collaborating on another of the “iconic papers” that were the seed of ChatGPT, the so-called “Transformer-XL“. That was a turning point in his career, because after that job he considered what he wanted to do with his life. Start up yes, but not in the US. His supervisor at CMU, Russ Salakhutdinov, I remembered in the Financial Times what he discussed with Yang, who made it clear to him that “if he didn’t at least try to create his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life.” The curious thing is that he did not do it in the US, where he would surely have obtained plenty of financing and economic support, but rather he went to China, where he founded Moonshot AI. There he created the mentioned models of AI, of which the latest version, Kimi K3, has turned the market upside down: an open model that competes with the best of Anthropic and OpenAI and that has made Yang a current protagonist in the sector. Working for others, what’s up?. There is a narrative in Silicon Valley that talks about how immigration regulation in the US is designed to get young talents to join large companies, and not so much to found their own startups. That was much more complicated, so the Chinese talents who had just trained in the US realized that they had a better option: return to their country of origin and create their startups there. Source: Hoover Institution. Chinese talent returns to China. A study by the Hoover Institution at Stanford analyzed the profile of the 356 researchers who worked on DeepSeek and revealed something surprising: 53.5% never studied or worked outside of China. Of those who did have an experience of this type and had studied or worked in the US, 70% ended up returning to their country. The Asian giant is no longer an exporter of brainiacs: it now has a self-sufficient quarry that boosts the country’s AI industry. Less money, better execution. The difference between the US and China is not only financial, but operational. A Chinese entrepreneur in the sector explained in that FT report that although setting up his startup in the US would guarantee a valuation up to 10 times higher, in China he is much more likely to launch real solutions and production in less than five years. It doesn’t matter the sanctions, the risk of censorship or a much more conservative investment market: the density of engineers and the familiarity of the environment compensate. Source: Stanford University. The US does not make it easy. The phenomenon of the “return home” of Chinese engineers not only affects recent graduates, but also veteran professionals who were already installed in the country’s academic and engineering system. a survey conducted by Stanford University in 2024 among 1,304 scientists of Chinese origin who lived and worked in the United States revealed curious data. 73% did not feel safe working as a researcher in the country, and 65% pointed directly to a fear of harassment and racist violence. Political uncertainty and institutional distrust have only accelerated the exits. Silicon Valley has a problem. The trajectory of Moonshot AI, which in just three years and with a team of 300 people has launched a fantastic model, shows that there is life beyond Silicon Valley. With Chinese talent returning en masse to China, the question is whether the US Government will modify its requirements and proposals for obtaining a visa. If they don’t, the “brain drain” can be absolute. Image | Tommao Wang In Xataka | Four decades ago, China decided to invest in training millions of engineers. Today that plan gives it an advantage in the race for AI

China had been chasing “black gold” for years. Now it has started to turn it into something much bigger

by

An almost invisible fiber can end up supporting part of a gigantic wind blade, forming part of the main loading structures of a metro train or protecting several satellites during the ascent of a rocket. That is what we have seen with the carbon fiber: a material that seems modest when we look at it as a simple filament, but that takes on another dimension when thousands of strands become a piece capable of reducing weight without giving up high resistance. Behind these products there is not only advanced chemistry, but a technology that China has been trying to industrialize for decades with its own means. The change is not that the country has now discovered this material, but that it is managing to take it far beyond the laboratory. For years, some of its research centers managed to obtain advanced fibers, but China continued to encounter difficulties to industrialize certain grades with the required stability, uniformity and scale. That barrier began to break with new production lines and today the expansion covers the entire chain, from the precursor to the composite materials and finished parts. That is the real leap: converting a technology pursued for decades into an industry capable of feeding other sectors. To understand why all this matters, it’s worth first looking at what’s inside that black coil. Carbon fiber is not a sheet or a solid piece, but a set of extremely fine filaments grouped in bundles. When we read 3K, 12K or 48K, we talk about of 3,000, 12,000 or 48,000 filaments per bundle. Afterwards, these threads are normally combined with a resin to form a composite: the fiber provides strength and rigidity in the chosen directions, while the matrix holds the whole together, protects it and transmits the forces. From filament to the development of a key industry The advantage appears when we relate its performance to weight. A structure made of a carbon fiber composite can offer high resistance and rigidity using less mass than certain metallic solutions, something that can translate into lower consumption, more autonomy, greater payload or larger components. The Airbus A350 incorporates CFRP in 53% of its structurewhile composite materials represent around 50% of the primary structure of the Boeing 787measured by weight. But it is not a universal solution: the material is still expensive and requires complex processes, while composite structures can suffer internal damage that is difficult to detect and repair. To find the origin of this advance we have to go back several decades. China was researching carbon fiber since the sixties and seventiesbut the obstacle was not only to produce it once, but to repeat the result within a factory. In 2005, the Shanxi Institute of Coal Chemistry received a national mission to industrialize a fiber equivalent to aerospace T300. Three years later, on June 30, 2008, a line in Yangzhou produced the first stable roll of aerospace fiber with performance equivalent to the T300. Since that advance, China has been developing higher performance fibers, first with references equivalent to T700 and T800 and later with T1000. In Datong, a line with about 200 tons per year capacity had completed in November 2025 verification of continuous operation. Numbers, however, can fool us if we read them as a simple ladder. T300, T700, T800 or T1000 come from commercial names developed by Toray and are used as references for certain performances, but they do not form a universal international classification nor do they alone summarize the quality, reliability or final use of the material. The magnitude of the change can also be measured in tons. According to the ATA world reportChina concentrated in 2025 an operational capacity of 171,080 tons annuallys, 52.5% of the 326,080 counted worldwide. The data places the country in the lead by scale, but it does not mean that it produced exactly that percentage or that it dominated all segments. In other words, available capacity does not equate to effective manufacturing, and an industrial fiber intended for wind blades does not require the same controls, intermediate materials and certifications as a product prepared to be incorporated into an airplane. In 2025, China had an operating capacity of 171,080 tons per year, 52.5% of those recorded worldwide. What is truly relevant begins when we stop counting reels and observe everything that happens before and after. To obtain the fiber, the precursor must be prepared, oxidized and carbonized; Then come the fabrics, the prepregs, the compounds and the shaping of the pieces. In Jilin, this sequence already coexists within the same industrial hub. Provincial authorities speak of 190,000 tons of precursor capacity, 70,000 of fiber and 50,000 of composites, in addition to pultrusion, machining and product manufacturing lines. That chain already ends in objects that we can identify. In Jilin, 230 lines make structural plates for wind blades, and the company says its products are used in 95% of the blades on the Chinese market. The CETROVO train entered commercial service in Qingdao in January 2025 with carbon compounds in main load elementswhile the fairings manufactured by Tianjin Aisida had contributed, according to local authorities, to 46 commercial launches that reached orbit until June 2026. On a global scale, the material is also used in hydrogen tanks and systems intended to reinforce bridges. China already leads the way in added capacity, and domestic manufacturers such as Jilin Chemical Fiber and Zhongfu Shenying are expanding their capacity and offering higher-performance fibers. Compared to them, the Japanese company Toray maintains a leading position due to its catalogue, its international presence and its industrial integration; The American Hexcel stands out especially in the aerospace market, while the Japanese Teijin and Mitsubishi Chemical continue to be relevant technological players. What China is building is not just more fiber: it is the ecosystem that allows it to become an industry. Images | Lawless Capture | Vong Vathanak In Xataka | “We chose the wrong technology”: Jensen Huang returns to Japan to acknowledge his debt to Sega 30 years … Read more

China has just launched its new heavy ion accelerator. He hasn’t built it just to study atoms

by

There are machines that are built to observe what we already know and others to push matter to places where we barely know what we are going to find. In Huizhou, China has raised a complex whose beam line runs two kilometers and which is capable of accelerating heavy ions and direct them against atomic nuclei with an intensity that is difficult to achieve in other laboratories. It looks like an infrastructure designed for nuclear physicists. That description, however, falls short. The decisive step came on Tuesday, July 21. The High Intensity Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility, known as HIAF, passed the acceptance reviewn that certifies the fulfillment of its construction objectives and entered into test operation for scientific research. The project, built by Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Scienceshad begun to rise in December 2018 and produced its first beam in October 2025. The work is finished; Now is the time to do science. Now, the HIAF does not function as a single track through which particles enter and exit at full speed. Its architecture distributes the work between three major systems: a superconducting linear accelerator that delivers intense beams in continuous or pulsed mode, a synchrotron that accumulates the ions and takes them to higher energies, and a storage ring that allows them to be preserved while researchers carry out precision measurements. It all starts with ions, atoms from which one or more electrons have been removed and which can be accelerated and guided by electric and magnetic fields. Those in charge of the project claim that it is the first advanced heavy ion research facility that brings together these three technologies. A facility designed to study much more than atoms We still don’t fully understand how many of the heavy elements we find around us formed in the universe. To reconstruct that history, researchers will use the HIAF to produce unstable nuclei, measure how they behave and explore the frontiers at which nuclear matter stops holding together. That work also opens the door to trying to create new superheavy elements. The goal is not only to expand what we know about the periodic table, but to better understand the cosmic processes that ended up forming elements such as uranium. The same beams that are used to investigate nuclei can also be used to subject chips, electronic components and materials to intense radiation. In space, the impact of an energetic particle can corrupt data, crash a circuit, or cause permanent damage to a component; Reproducing part of these effects on land allows them to be studied before incorporating the technology into a satellite or ship. The HIAF was also born with that function: to offer a controlled environment in which to check what resists and what fails when a device must operate under the radiation of space. When these ions reach tissues or materials, the experiment changes scale, but not principle. Its energy can be used in the medical sector and, at the same time, to accelerate the accumulation of radiation damage in materials intended for advanced nuclear systems or to future fusion environments. We are not facing a hospital or a reactor intended to produce electricity. What the HIAF offers is something prior and decisive: a place to verify, under controlled parameters, what works, what degrades and what needs to be redesigned. The start-up phase has already left some figures with which to measure its capacity. According to those responsible for the projectthe team completed beam commissioning along the two-kilometer line in 16 hours, a record among comparable facilities. It also maintains that the pulsed intensities of the oxygen and bismuth beams exceeded previous international references by factors of three and 7.5, respectively. During the tests, work has already been carried out on nuclear masses, production of radioactive beams, nuclear structure and irradiation of materials. These are initial results: the HIAF is still being tested and must now demonstrate to what extent it can transform that capacity into real discoveries and applications. Images | Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences In Xataka | In the 70s, a Nobel Prize winner in physics mathematically solved the tourist’s great dilemma: which restaurant to choose

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.