china

Germany wants to do what Japan did with rare earths in 2010: join forces against China

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BMW, Rheinmetall and the main German industries are working on the creation of a joint agency to purchase critical mineralsa move that would reduce dependence on China, according to they count from Financial Times. The idea is to pursue the model that Japan proposed a few years ago, and the story behind it explains why it makes sense. The starting point. In 2010, China imposed an embargo on rare earth exports to Japan in the midst of a territorial dispute. Tokyo depended on these materials to manufacture everything from cars to electronics. To alleviate the mess they had gotten themselves into, they decided to build an alternative architecture. They created JOGMEC (Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security), a state agency that collaborates with the country’s main conglomerates to ensure the supply of minerals, oil and gas. With this, Japan significantly reduced its dependence on China for rare earths. What Germany is building now. According to counted In the middle, BMW works together with the VDA automobile lobby and representatives of the German defense industry in order to develop a structure similar to what Japan did at the time. Rheinmetall is also in the talks. The specific idea is to create a kind of large private company that bulk buys critical raw materials (lithium, gallium, germanium, rare earths) on behalf of German industry. Just like share In the middle, the federal government could participate with a minority stake. The figures are not yet finalized, but the total cost of the project could amount to several hundred million euros. Why now. Last year, China imposed export controls on essential materials for batteries, permanent magnets and weapons systems. In November it temporarily suspended some of these restrictions until November 2026, but the scare was already in place. Europe was exposedwithout real alternatives, without negotiating power, nothing to do. And German industry (car manufacturers, defense companies, industrial machinery) realized how fragile its supply chain was. The Japanese model. JOGMEC works because it combines public capital with the agility that its large private companies allow, as they are structures with centuries of history in Japan specialized in industrial supply. Germany already has a raw materials agency, DERA, but sources close to the media recognize that needs a profound reform to fulfill that role. The agency being proposed now would have more muscle, with active financing, investment capacity in mining and recycling projects, and direct presence in the market. The state development bank KfW has already prepared a fund of 1 billion euros to finance mining, processing and recycling projects of critical materials, which would serve as a complement. Diplomacy. Just like account The media, Chancellor Friedrich Merz contacted Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi this week, and critical minerals were on the table. And Japan has shown interest in exporting its model abroad. In parallel, this same week the media informed also that the Australian Lynas Rare Earths, the largest producer of rare earths outside China, has closed a supply agreement with Japan with a guaranteed minimum price of $110 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium for 12 years. The same price that Washington guaranteed to the American producer MP Materials. The tension with Brussels. The European Commission also works in a centralized body to coordinate strategic purchases and reserves of critical minerals. But from Germany there is skepticism. According to share FT, Germany’s position is that “the industry must make its own decisions” and that governments should limit themselves to managing strategic reserves. In other words, Berlin prefers a model of private initiative with specific state support rather than leaving the strategy in the hands of Brussels. What is at stake. Steel, lithium and rare earths are the backbone of the energy transition and European rearmament. Without neodymium there are no magnets for electric motors or guided missiles. Without gallium and germanium there are no advanced semiconductors. China controls between 60% and 90% of the production chain for most of these materials. Hence many countries are restless. Cover image | Prometheus and Wikimedia Commons In Xataka | The United States knows it has a problem with rare earths from China. And he believes he has an alternative: Mexico

China has turned OpenClaw into a viral phenomenon. And then it has prohibited its officials from using it

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The appearance of the AI ​​agent OpenClaw has meant that we are living in a kind of second “DeepSeek moment“They know it well in China, where its use has exploded in such a way that the Government has had to act. And it has probably done well. An absolutely viral AI. The OpenClaw project has caused a real earthquake in China. In cities like Shenzhen there are queues to physically install it and people paying for others to install it remotely or in person. The AI ​​agent is breaking all popularity records for programming projects, and for example has already surpassed two legends such as React or Linux in terms of stars awarded on GitHub, a measure of the popularity of open source projects. In just three months, OpenClaw has managed to surpass the legendary leaders of this ranking in GitHub stars: react and linux. Source: Star-History.com Solution to Chinese fragmentation. The secret of this success in the Asian giant is not based only on the curiosity of users, but also on the fact that OpenClaw provides a striking solution to an endemic problem in the country: the fragmentation of business software. With an average of 150 independent IT systems per company and 60% of them without APIs or documentation, AI integration seemed to be an insurmountable wall. OpenClaw solves the problem because you can take control of the machine, “see” buttons and text boxes, click and type in browsers, and operate as if you were a human. Tokens everywhere. That ability has turned this project into an absolute “token hole.” Unlike a conventional chatbot like ChatGPT, OpenClaw works continuously and autonomously, and it is not uncommon to see an advanced user consume 50 million tokens daily. The impact has been massive: at the end of February, Chinese models such as Kimi 2.5 or DeepSeek were already devouring 61% of the global OpenRouter tokens, a platform that allows you to easily use APIs from dozens of AI models. The fever has been such that Kimi has generated in 20 days more income than all expected by its creator, Moonshot IA, by 2025. Alarm. The problem is precisely that: when software has the ability to “see” everything that happens on a screen and execute commands by itself, the security risks are enormous. This has made the Beijing government go from enthusiasm—cities like Shenzhen offer million-dollar subsidies for their development—to a policy that is now totally restrictive. Government agencies, state-owned companies and large national banks have received urgent notices prohibiting the installation of OpenClaw in office devices and even in mobile phones that are used in this type of segments. Be careful with your data. Practically since it went viral, many have warned of the cybersecurity risks involved in using OpenClaw. An initial audit of the skills available on ClawdHub detected hundreds of them as malicious. That was the germ of the OpenClaw alliance with the Spanish cybersecurity firm VirusTotalpart of Google. The risk with this project is threefold: You have access to private data Can communicate with the outside You are exposed to untrustworthy content and attacks from prompt injection One of lime and one of sand. For large Chinese technology companies, the government’s measures are bittersweet. On the one hand, they have rushed to offer one-click OpenClaw deployments in their clouds for interested users. On the other hand, state restriction has meant that some of the AI ​​startups such as Zhipu (Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC Ltd.) or MiniMax Group have quickly fallen on the stock market for the news. China and control. There is another key element in that political movement: the loss of control. The Beijing government has already fought a battle in the past to curb the power of giants like Alibaba, and that caused the “Asian Jeff Bezos”, Jack Ma, came out very badly. An autonomous AI agent that operates outside of that government control represents a challenge to the mechanisms that China has been perfecting, especially with its Great Firewall. An uncertain future. These new restrictions pose a complex future for the project in China. The Asian giant has embraced AI more than anyone else, but the security risks in this case are so clear that limits had to be set before things got out of control. Even so, the project is Open Source, which will make it difficult for its deployment to be halted by end users and enthusiasts, no matter how much the Chinese Government wants it. Image | OpenClaw | Paul Kagame In Xataka | Every time Facebook had a competitor, it bought it: it is exactly the same thing that OpenAI is doing

is dismantling ‘made in China’ faster than we expected

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One in four iPhones is already assembled in India. Apple has delivered in 2025 exactly what JPMorgan forecast in 2022but it has done so at a speed that has surprised the sector. Why is it important. This is perhaps the clearest sign to date that China has lost its status as an irreplaceable player in high-end consumer electronics manufacturing. If Apple can make this move, others can too. In figures: 55 million of iPhones made in India in 2025, up from 36 million in 2024 (a 53% increase in a single year). 25% of world production, for a total of between 220 and 230 million units. 9 billion dollars in iPhone sales in India last year, a record. 14 million of units sold in the country, with a growth of 9% year-on-year. The backdrop. Apple has been around for years trying to reduce its dependence on Chinabut the Chinese supply chain was so efficient and so dense that the movement moved slowly. Then came Trump’s tariffs, and what was a long-term strategy became an emergency. In May 2025, Trump himself called Tim Cook to ask him to stop expanding production in Indiawhich gives an idea of ​​the scale and speed of the transfer. Between the lines. Tariffs have been the perfect excuse to do what Apple has wanted to do for a long time. The company has not only transferred volume: it has also transferred its most profitable models. India now assembles the entire iPhone 17 lineincluding the Pro and Pro Max. That is not outsourcing cheap, it is entrusting India with the jewel in the crown. Yes, but. Manufacturing in India is still more expensive than in China or Vietnam. The Modi government’s incentives (the export-linked production program) have been the glue of this strategy, and they expire imminently, on March 31. Apple, like Samsung, is negotiating with the government for a new round of subsidies. If these do not arrive and the incentive agreement expires without anything to relieve it, India’s attractiveness becomes more complicated. In Xataka | Apple has only found one option to make a cheap laptop: make it a mobile Featured image | TejjXataka with Mockuuups Studio

If the question is how much OpenClaw is taking over, the answer is… in China they are lining up to install it

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One of the AI ​​phenomena of 2026 is OpenClawone of the most powerful tools (and at the same time dangerous) never released. In China, just a few days ago, nearly a thousand people queued in front of the headquarters of the Chinese technology company Tencent Holdings in Shenzhen. Reason: they wanted to install OpenClaw on their computers. OpenClaw fever. In less than 100 days, OpenClaw has conquered Asia. Of the more than 140,000 AI agents based on its technology, half come from China. Tencent issued an open invitation to its headquarters in Shenzen so that company engineers could install OpenClaw completely free of charge on the computers of those who came. Nearly 1,000 people physically turned out to install the software formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot. Because. The enthusiasm for OpenClaw comes from the combination of several key points. China’s early adoption of new technology Push by big technology companies to implement it (Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance) Real agentic functions, far above what any chatbot offers. It’s not just OpenClaw. ArkClarw, MaxClaw, AutoClaw… The OpenClaw fever has triggered variants of the original, with derivative projects that seek to further specialize their work. It is a perfect storm that fits with the Chinese need to meet the massive demand for AI use while consuming few tokens. This matches perfectly with what China is looking for: cheap, Open Source models prepared for large volumes of use. Yes, but. Although Chinese consumers are demanding use of OpenClaw, the country’s authorities are moving in the opposite direction. As Bloomberg reports, state-owned companies and government agencies have received notices in recent days warning them not to install OpenClaw for security reasons. In the most extreme cases, and according to anonymous Bloomberg sources, the installation of this software has been banned in critical sectors such as banking and some government agencies. Lobster farming. There is a new buzzword creating a trend in China: “locust farming”. One that has to do with the OpenClaw logo and the tendency to install its variants. The project has already surpassed Linux on GitHub in terms of ratings, and despite doubts about its security, it has made something clear: agentic AI is not so far away from what we thought. In Xataka | Agentic AI was the new race for Big Tech and Meta was far behind. It has bought the company most capable of recovering

China already dominates the screen market. The US and Japan have decided to draw up a plan to stop their advance

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China currently accounts for almost 60% of the LCD panel market which are used in the manufacture of monitors, televisions and other display devices. The growth of Chinese companies BOE and TCL has caused South Korean panel manufacturers, such as LG Display or Samsung Display, gradually abandon LCD technology to dedicate their resources to other, more profitable innovations, like OLED technology. South Korea produces most of the organic matrices (OLED) that we can find in our televisions and mobile phones, among other devices, but China’s market share in this segment does not stop growing. In fact, It is already close to 40% in OLED panels for smartphones, and presumably little by little it will also grow in the segment of large-format OLED matrices for televisions and monitors. However, South Korea is not the only country that is suffering from China’s monumental onslaught. Japan, Taiwan and the US also fear that their display device manufacturers will end up in the hands of Chinese suppliers, something that is essentially already happening to a large extent if we stick to LCD technology. This dependency also acquires a critical nature in the field of screens used in military systems. Japan Display will be the great beneficiary of the very probable agreement between the US and Japan During the 80s, 90s and the first decade of the 2000s, Japan led the screen market with its cathode ray tube televisions, and later with its first LCD and plasma panels. However, in the early 2000s, Japanese companies made a strategic mistake: they bet everything on plasma technology because they believed that it would end up taking over LCD technology. South Korea, however, opted for the production of these latest matrices, and finally Samsung and LG won this war. The state-of-the-art plant that Japan Display plans to build in the US will cost about $13 billion Japan paid a very high price for this strategic mistake: it lost a large part of its share in the market for the production of panels for display devices. Twenty years later, the US and Japanese governments are determined to amend it to compete with the solutions coming from China. And they plan to do it by investing, according to Reutersa package of 550 billion dollars coming from Japanese funds. Some of this money will presumably be used to build a state-of-the-art display manufacturing plant in the US. It will cost about $13 billion and will be managed by Japan Display, a consortium created in 2012 as the result of the merger of the panel production divisions of Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba. This plan seeks to limit the dependence that American and Japanese manufacturers have on matrices from China, especially in the field of technology militaryrbut they are not going to have it easy. And it is that the consulting firm Counterpoint Research It predicts that China will expand its share of the display market to reach 75% in 2028. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | Reuters In Xataka | LG and Samsung have a new pact that no one expected, according to Reuters. One who wants to shake up the television market In Xataka | China is devouring the television market. So much so that Panasonic is considering abandoning it

The Iran war is making the best possible advertisement for Chinese renewables. And China knows it

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Oil has skyrocketed again. Brent has crossed 90 dollars, WTI is around 87, and the Strait of Hormuz, through which nearly 20% of the world’s oil transits, has reduced its traffic from 138 ships a day to just two. The most interesting thing here is not the price of crude oil but who wins when that happens. Why is it important. Each shock oil is, for China, a free advertisement on a planetary scale of its energy value proposition. Solar panels, electric cars and batteries do not rise in price when there is a war in the Persian Gulf. Natural gas and gasoline, yes. For countries that have been buying Chinese clean technology for years, this week has been the practical demonstration that they got it right. For those who have not yet done so, it is the best sales argument that China could wish for, and on top of that it has not involved a direct expense. The contrast. The US economy is structurally more vulnerable to the shocks of oil than China. The oil intensity of US GDP, that is, how much oil is needed to generate each dollar of economic activity, is notably higher than that of China, the EU or Russia. When crude oil soars, the blow is felt harder by the American consumer, who fills the tank of his car with gasoline, than by the Chinese consumer, whose fleet of vehicles is already almost 50% electric in new sales. In November 2025, electric cars They exceeded 60% of total sales in China. It is not a country in energy transition: it is a country that has already changed fuel in its largest vehicle fleet. And that is without counting the traffic of motorcycles, all electric for many years in several of its large cities, and with much greater volume than in other countries. Between the lines. China produces more than twice as many solar panels as the world is capable of absorbingand its batteries and electric cars are already reaching Western Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. When oil rises, the economic equation for those exports improves automatically, without your government having to lift a finger. An energy crisis in the Gulf acts as an indirect subsidy to its clean industries: it makes everything China sells more attractive and everything it doesn’t sell more expensive. In figures. The clean energy sector already represents 11.4% of Chinese GDP, according to The analysis published by Carbon Brief last month. Without those industries, China would have grown 3.5% in 2025 instead of the 5% recorded. Electric cars and batteries explain 44% of the economic impact of that sector. China installed 315 GW of solar and 119 GW of wind in 2025, more than the rest of the world combined in both categories. Yes, but. China also imports oil, a lot. It remains one of the world’s largest buyers of crude oil, and the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz complicates its short-term supply. In fact, in recent weeks China has increased its oil imports by almost 16% due to uncertainty. That said, In September it already began to make an unusual collection. What changes the long-term equation is not that China is immune to the shocks oil producers, but each crisis accelerates the internal conversion towards renewables and reinforces the export argument against third countries. It is a temporary pain that finances a structural advantage. Furthermore, this scenario leaves a question in the air: whether the world, by purchasing Chinese clean technology, is ultimately exchanging an energy dependency for a technological dependency. In both the United States and Europe this will end up becoming a question as uncomfortable as it is inevitable. In Xataka | On the roof of the world, China is building the largest solar park on the planet Featured image | Nuno Marques

China claims that having its own ASML is not that difficult. At the end of the day “ASML is a simple integrator”

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China is advancing at a fearsome speed, but they are their own critics. A group of scientists and industry representatives has published an analysis very critical in which they describe their semiconductor industry as “small, dispersed and weak.” For these experts, the problem is that they do not have their own ASML, so they propose creating one, and the curious thing about it is precisely that: that they do not see it as difficult to do. Not authors, authorities. Among the authors of the study are Wang Yangyuan —co-founder of SMIC— or Chen Nanxiang —director of the YMTC NAND chip manufacturer—. Both they and the rest of the participants are recognized personalities in the field of semiconductors. That makes it clear that this articlepublished in the magazine Science and Technology Review China is valuable to understand the state of this industry. The US veto works. This article indicates that the United States has managed to contain China’s advance in three areas: electronic design automation (EDA) used in chip design, the manufacture of silicon wafers, and the creation of chip manufacturing equipment, especially those with extreme ultraviolet (UVE) photolithographic technologya segment that is absolutely dominated by the Dutch ASML and that China has not yet managed to match despite its efforts. There are many companies, but they are too small. The study analyzes in depth the situation of the Chinese semiconductor market, which they describe as small, dispersed and weak. And to prove it they give a significant fact: there are 3,626 domestic chip design companies in China, but “the total value of the industry’s output was 646 billion yuan (approximately 91 billion dollars). In other words: the total sales of these 3,626 companies were less than the sales of NVIDIA alone.” Smartphone chips are doing well. Of course, these experts point out that several Chinese companies have managed to reach “the world’s leading edge” in terms of chips for smartphones. They mention HiSilicon Semiconductor and Unisoc, which occupy the first and second place among the largest smartphone chip designers in China, with market shares of 20 and 10% respectively. And the “mature” chips, too. Something similar happens with chips with much more mature technologies, such as those manufactured with 28 nm photolithography or higher. That problem is already solved in China, which does not have to depend so much on foreign manufacturers. In fact, China now represents 33% of global production in this segment, and design and manufacturing processes are not limited by internal restrictions. Too dependent. Despite its many advances, China remains the world’s largest importer of integrated circuits. It invested $385.79 billion in 2024 in these components, even exceeding its oil imports ($324.7 billion). Here China has a big problem of dependence on chips from third-party foreign manufacturers, and this is especially noticeable in automotive chips (95% of them import) and memory chips (90%): all of them depend on imports. There is a clear bottleneck in high-end integrated circuit production. In search of Chinese ASML. The document also addresses competition with ASML but not as a direct commercial rivalry, but as a strategic challenge of technological sovereignty. The Dutch company is described as “a simple integrator” that coordinates more than 5,000 suppliers to manage the 10,000 components of an EUV machine. The suggestion of the study is precisely to create a Chinese ASML that unifies the advances made by different companies. But. Although progress has been made In this ambitious objective of creating SVU machines, “integrating them with a national effort is a problem that must be resolved during the 15th five-year plan” that concludes in 2030. To do this, these experts assure, there must be financial support and human personnel is required. We already knew that China I was trying to copy ASMLbut for now it is going badly. The document talks about developments such as promising Flip-FET technology (FFET) of Peking University. This advance allows us to reach 3-2 nm nodes without depending exclusively on EUV machines, but it remains to be seen if this method ends up being successful or not. In Xataka | Holland has just declared war on China in the most important battle of the century: control of semiconductors

Mobile phones in China are suffering the biggest price increase in five years. The culprit is not a manufacturer: it is AI

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Smartphones face a year of challenges due to the price of basic components such as RAM. The predictions They are already talking about increases of between 90 and 150 dollars for basic mobile phones, and between 300 and 400 dollars in the case of high-end mobile phones. AI is about to blow up an industry that has claimed its first victim: Meizu. Go for it, leave almost everything. I still remember that MWC last year when I stopped by the Meizu stand. I liked what I saw: new batch mobiles, with balanced hardware, the design and ROM that I fell in love with almost a decade ago and a shocking promise: the manufacturer was preparing its global launch. A history of mobile manufacturing in China, about to return to Europe as an alternative to manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Honor or OPPO. what has happened. Recently, Meizu has announced its exit from the smartphone market to focus their efforts on AI. In addition to the strong competition in its local market, the sharp rise in RAM prices makes it difficult for the manufacturer to be competitive against more established brands. It is a movement similar to that of ASUS, which He has said goodbye to his Zenfone family to focus on AI solutions and other types of products. The death of the quality-price mobile phone? 2026 will be a critical year for quality-price mobile phones. For years, manufacturers have been able to play with relatively comfortable margins: RAM abundance Component recycling A supply chain at your entire disposal The RAM giants have their shelves collapsed due to requests related to AI, and cheap modules have completely stopped being a priority. The dilemma. IDC analysts make it clear that we are witnessing a major shock in the supply chain. It’s not a temporary high: AI has completely changed market priorities, and things like RAM won’t stabilize in price anytime soon. Historically, we have normalized annual cycles and launches “just because”, even though there was no hardware or news to justify the launch of clone phones year after year. Maybe and just maybe, the price crisis will make manufacturers have to rethink their strategy. Image | Meizu In Xataka | Expensive and premium mobile phones are not a fad: they are the new standard, and Motorola knows it

While the West debates what to do with AI in schools, in China there are already schools turning it into a child tutor

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Anyone who has been a child or a parent knows the scene: the flexo light on, an incomprehensible math problem on the table, tears falling from the frustration of not understanding a lesson or not being able to pronounce a foreign language, and a parent losing patience after explaining the same thing for the fifth time. In China they have found a way to turn it around, parents frustrated and exhausted by their workdays are delegating the academic supervision of their children to artificial intelligence. While in different countries there is a strong debate and fear about whether AI erodes critical thinking of students, the opposite is true in China: a 2025 survey led by KPMG revealed that more than 90% of the Chinese are optimistic about this technology. The phenomenon came to light and sparked debate on social media when a mother in Shandong province discovered her husband playing on his mobile phone while letting her Kimi AIa chatbot capable of processing two million characters, did his son’s homework. But this father is not an isolated case. Many adults are using AI not just to teach, but to do the dreaded “parenting chores.” Mr. Zhang, for example, admitted to using the chatbot Doubao to generate summaries of the Aesop’s Fables and print step-by-step images for your third grader’s craft projects. The market has responded with an avalanche of gadgets. Zheng Wenqi, a working mother, bought for about 375 dollars the “Native Language Star”, a device composed of a mask that muffles your voice in Chinese and a speaker that translates it into English to converse with your children. Others, like university professor Wu Ling, They invested $1,170 in AlphaDoga robot dog powered by the DeepSeek model that practices English, dances and keeps his only son company. There are even parents who have gone one step further by becoming creators. This is the case of Yin Xingyu, a mother from Shenzhen who does not know how to program, but who uses the technique of vibecoding with DeepSeek to create interactive English word games for her 6-year-old daughter, as well as generate personalized comics using the Nano Banana Pro imaging model. For the purist parents, devices have emerged such as the “Youdao AI Q&A Pen”, a smart pen designed from “asceticism”: it has no browser or games, it only guides the child step by step in their mathematical reasoning without giving them the direct answer. A multi-million dollar business in a gray area All this enthusiasm has fueled a runaway educational technology market valued at more than $43 billion. Outsourcing has left the homes to take to the streets and, until July 2024, The opening of about 50,000 was estimated “AI study rooms” across the country. In these establishments, children sit in cubicles in front of standardized tablets; They cannot leave until the indicators on the screen turn from red (errors) to green (correct answers). As detailed on CCTVthe “teachers” in these rooms do not teach, they are prohibited from explaining the subject and they act as mere supervisors and commissioned salespeople. To cope with the monotony of 6 to 8 hours answering questions, some children learn to play Go or Gomoku secretly on the same machines, often with the supervisors’ blind eye. However, former employees and parents report that in many of these centers, “artificial intelligence” is just a marketing façade to charge more, and children simply consume pre-recorded lessons on basic tablets. Behind these study rooms hides a business survival tactic. Many of these centers operate in a gray zone to avoid the strict “double reduction” policy. imposed by the government in 2021which banned for-profit tutoring to relieve financial and academic pressure on families. By arguing that “it is AI that teaches and not a human,” these companies dodge education regulators, registering under names of “cultural media” and avoiding words like “enrollment” or “classes.” Franchises are strategically expanding into peri-urban areas and small towns, where rents are low and parents are equally willing to pay for a place to leave their children. This mass adoption is no accident; is backed by a clear state directive. The Chinese government is promoting the integration of AI in education as part of a national strategy to accelerate its technological progress against global competitors such as the United States. The regulations are already on the table. Starting with the fall 2025 semester, Beijing will require a minimum of eight hours per year of AI education in all primary and secondary schools. The transition has been rapid and planned, with higher education leading the way: 99% of university students and teachers in China already use generative tools, and elite universities such as Zhejiang or Fudan have made AI courses mandatory and transversal subjects. Science supports this dive. An empirical study conducted with high school students in H city showed that the duration of daily use of AI tools significantly and positively influences students’ AI knowledge and algorithmic thinking. That is, constant exposure is already shaping your cognitive and technological abilities. The debate is served The families’ opinions are drastically divided. For many, AI democratizes education. Mothers like Li Linyun celebrate that the Doubao chatbot be a “24-hour, knowledgeable and extremely patient teacher,” which has saved him hundreds of dollars on human tutors and improved his relationship with his daughter. On the other hand, technological dependence terrifies educators and a faction of parents, who criticize that children are becoming lazy and losing the ability to think independently. In study halls, proctors notice that students, desperate to turn the screen green, resort to tactical memorization: repeatedly choosing incorrect answers by discard until the system approves them, without actually learning the concept. Added to this is the “AI illusion” and its hallucinations. Su Xiao, mother of a ninth grader, discovered that the general models They could invent historical data with complete confidence and fluency, or omit crucial data in mathematical problems, offering logically impeccable but erroneous results. This forced her to become a “cyber quality inspector,” … Read more

China is so clear that the future of pork lies in ‘skyscraper farms’ that it is doing something: taking them to other countries

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When you think of pig farms, what comes to mind are large farms with pig pens, breeding areas, silos with feed… All of this (of course) horizontally. Things change if we are in China. There they have been thinking vertically for years and betting on farms in buildings of various heights, including authentic skyscrapers, such as the two 26-story towers raised in Ezhou (Hubei) and that are capable of breeding 1.2 million pigs every year. Now China has started ‘international’ model. What has happened? That China has begun to export its model of macro farms pig verticals. Although a few years ago the ‘farm towers’ sounded like science fiction and there were even foreign ranchers who raised their eyebrows reading about them, the bet seems to have worked for Beijing. At least enough to consider take her to Vietnamwhere the Chinese firm Muyuan Foods has joined forces with the local BAF to build a complex in the province of Tay Ninhin the southeast of the country. Its main peculiarity: breeding at altitude. What do they want to do? The idea is to develop a high-rise complex dedicated to pig farming, an infrastructure that will be carried out with an investment of just over 450 million dollars and will integrate a farm of 64,000 pigs with a factory capable of producing close to 600,000 tons of feed every year. In September Vietnam Investment Review pointed out that the project has received approval from the authorities of the province of Tay Ninh, where the complex will be built, and from the state authorities. What does it have to do with China? That one of the promoters of the project is Muyuan Foodshe greatest breeder of pigs from China and a heavy weight of the sector at an international level. In addition to his enormous capacity of production, the firm stands out for its commitment to raising pigs in buildings of up to six floors. “We have replaced traditional single-story pig farms with multi-story ones to improve efficiency and land use, promote recycling of manure and waste and ensure biosecurity,” the company explained during its IPO in Hong Kong, a few weeks ago. What is China doing? Although in other countries macro pig farms in towers may be shocking, in China they have been implementing the model for some time. To understand it, you have to go back to 2018, when the country saw how swine fever undermined its herds. The American Society for Microbiology estimates that in total the outbreak killed or forced the sacrifice of 225 million of pigs. The country is the largest producer and pork consumer in the world and it is estimated that before the 2018 outbreak it housed half of the planet’s pig population. In 2019, the Government formally allowed the use of multi-story buildings for livestock farming and just a year later Muyuan opened its doors. a macro complex in Nanyangwith twenty blocks of various plants capable of producing more than two million pigs each year. Little by little, China has been moving from a model in which pig farming was a common practice in homes (it still is in part of the country) to one based on commercial farms in which it is easier to manage waste and diseases such as swine fever. Why farms in skyscrapers? a few years ago The New York Times I was chatting with an expert of the US pork market that acknowledged that US farmers “look at photos of Chinese farms and just scratch their heads and say, ‘We would never dare do that.’” The truth is that buildings like those of Muyuan or the 26-story towers driven by Hubei Zhongxin Kaiwei Modern Farming in Ezhou have their advantages. This is what its promoters defend, at least, who present it as another step towards industrial agriculture. The same one that has also opted for the vertical farming farms. By thinking vertically, instead of the traditional horizontal model, they basically seek greater biosecurity and more efficient management. Why’s that? In the Ezhou skyscrapers, for example, they boast of incorporating thousands of automatic feeding points and a system capable of collecting, analyzing and using livestock feces. Not to mention that by betting on high-rise models, macro farms such as those in Muyuan, Zhongxin or Guangxi Yangxiang make it possible to address one of the sector’s biggest problems: the availability of land is limited, especially in populated areas. Of course, the tall model also has significant risks. The main one: that diseases spread more quickly through ventilation systems. Now, as Beijing tries stabilize the livestock herd China to avoid surpluses and prop up prices, the country is considering taking vertical macro farms beyond its borders. Images | China-Singapore Kaiwei Modern Animal Husbandry WeChat In Xataka | The new Spanish farmer no longer lives in the town: his name is John, he studied at Wharton and manages olive trees from New York

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