china

China is strangling critical materials that the US needs for its technology industry. It’s a two speed war

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In early May, Trump went to China on an official trip and took an entourage of CEOs on Air Force One. They were all from the technology (Cristiano Amon, Tim Cook, Elon Musk or Jensen Huang, for example), but also others energy, the space industry or semiconductors. One of them was Jim Anderson of Coherent, who was very interested in something very specific: why China is taking more than necessary in issue export licenses of indium phosphide. Anderson is blown away by indium phosphide for a very specific reason: It’s an essential material for high-speed optical chips. And, although it may seem very specific, it turns out that it is the key piece that the data centers new generation of the United States. And China, as with other strategic materials and metals, is in control. Optical chips. Data centers house miles and miles of visible cables that connect servers to the network and power, but they are not the only ones. Within each device, the chips are linked by cable and it is a functional technology, but with a limit that is beginning to be reached. If you want to improve latency and bandwidth (and, therefore, the performance of artificial intelligence platforms), you must rethink the internal connection to communicate the chips. That’s where optics come into play. By connecting chips by laser, the performance of the equipment is multiplied and Nvidia is so convinced of this that, a few months ago, invested 4 billion dollars in two companies: Lumentum and Coherent. They estimate that, with copper that is at its limit, connecting clusters of thousands of processors by laser is the solution to the physical problem that they are beginning to encounter. They are components with a very high degree of specialization and a series of materials from the rare earth which, as we have said on numerous occasions, are under the control of China. Indium phosphide is not a rare earth derivative, but it is a strategic material. Strangling the market . And therein lies the problem. The United States wants to promote its technological independence (because they have Big Tech, but practically everything is manufactured outside the United States) and, to achieve this, they need a series of materials that are not in their possession. China has that dominancebut with each restriction and veto that is applied to them from the US, they respond with the same currency, but vetoing what American technology companies need so much: rare earth metals. That is why they are classified as minerals, metals and strategic components, and indium phosphide is among them. China produces approximately 70% of the world’s indium and started to apply restrictions to the supply chain in February 2025. This has caused not only prices to skyrocket by 250%, but also American technology companies to pressure to reverse the situation. The main complaint is that, instead of directly blocking the finished products, it slows down the entire process because They are capable of conditioning the export of the materials used to create those products. Therefore, the optical module ecosystem cannot scale as quickly as hyperscalers need. Domino. Taking this situation into account, what is happening with these security systems advanced photonics It is exactly the same as with NAND chips: all the fish are sold for the next few years. In this sense, as consumers we absolutely don’t care because it is something that only affects AI companies, but it is estimated that Lumentum will have everything sold out in 2026, 2027 and… 2028, despite having quadrupled its production. It not only affects American companies, since the Taiwanese VPEC and LandMark Optoelectronics are also suffering interruptions in the supply of the material. And it doesn’t matter if Lumentum or Coherent are multiplying their capacity by opening new plants because the raw materials continue to leave China and, if those export controls are in place, It is an insurmountable funnel. The other side of the coin. On the other hand we have the Chinese industry. In recent years, its technologies have taken a giant leap, expanding its capacity and beginning to make waves in the international conversation with both user level components (RAM memory and computers) and in the high technological spheres (photonics and semiconductors). Because China has detailed the plan to become the world’s leading technological power by 2030 and it is clear that they have both a very defined roadmap and, above all, the materials necessary to achieve that goal and which companies are the ones that will define that future. Huawei or SMIC are two proper namesbut there are others like Yuanjie that have skyrocketed in the stock market. The reason? They are the ones who are creating photonics components for data centers. In Xataka | Huawei no longer competes: it is building its own parallel reality

This is the hydroelectric colossus with which China “is trying to tame nature”

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China has proposed a titanic challenge in the heart of the Himalayas: the construction of the Motuo megadam on the Yarlung Tsangpo River, which aspires to become the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. With this project, the Asian country seeks to far surpass the legendary Three Gorges Dam. However, as Tenzin Norgay, a researcher at the International Campaign for Tibetwith this monumental display “They are trying to tame nature.” Your numbers. To understand the scale of this hydroelectric project, just look at the figures, since according to experts, there is nothing on the scale of this dam when talking about numbers that are stratospheric. As a first piece of information, the generation capacity stands out, which will mean between 60 and 70 GW of power. Another important data is the annual energy production that point to 300 billion kWh per year, which is triple the capacity of the already monstrous Three Gorges Dam. In perspective, This means generating the energy for everything the United Kingdom consumes annually, and to achieve this the project requires digging 20 kilometer long tunnels in mountainous terrain. And if that were not enough, more than one wall is needed, making the dam made up of five interconnected hydroelectric plants. Reading these figures we can assume that it is not something cheap at all, and the truth is that we are not wrong, since the cost My dear of the entire work ranges between 167,000 and 170,000 million dollars. It’s a risk. The great technical challenge of the Motuo dam is not only its dizzying size, but also the place chosen to build it, since the Himalayan belt is an extremely unstable at a geological level. A report by Probe International warns that incessant seismic activity puts a big question mark over this superproject, especially in a Tibetan region where 68 dams are already operating and another 101 are in the planning phase. Looking back, recent events have highlighted the real risk of earthquakes for infrastructure located on the “roof of the world.” Internal doubts. Even within China itself there are doubts since Chinese geologist Fan Xiao has warned that the associated risks and lack of electricity demand in sparsely populated Tibet make the project unjustified. Added to this are the enormous economic and energy transmission costs necessary to transport that electricity to the urban centers of the country. Side B. Beijing defends the project as a necessary step towards decarbonization and here experts contextualize that this work is part of China’s strategic sustainability vision to abandon its enormous dependence on coal. However, Darrin Magee, a hydropower expert at Western Washington University, pointed out that this source of energy is not so sustainable in the long term due to the large greenhouse gas emissions produced by the reservoirs and suggests that, in Tibet, alternating with wind and solar plants would be more prudent. Images | Tejj In Xataka | More than 600 dams collapsed in Europe last year alone. The proud responsibility is the European Union

In China, ‘bookfluencers’ are the sales engine of the publishing industry. The problem is that no one can read 700 books.

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In China, publishers have discovered a rich vein thanks to bookfluencers. Reviews on social networks such as Douyin (the Chinese TikTok) or RedNote have become the sales engine for many books in recent years. However, the volume of books and the intense competition between these influencers has led to the credibility of the model beginning to be questioned. what has happened. They tell it in world of chinese. A book content creator posted a 25-minute video exposing another professional colleague who has more than half a million followers. In the video, he shows a paper almost 5 meters long with a list of 700 books that this bookfluencer had supposedly recommended on his social networks. There wouldn’t be any problem if it weren’t for the fact that they were the readings of a single year. It comes out almost two books a day. Authenticity not found. There is even more and, when reviewing the reviews, he found something curious. They were full of repeated and very exaggerated phrases. For example, this influencer felt “transformed” by 17 different books and “healed” by 33 more. We don’t know if he used AI to summarize the books and do the reviews, but clearly they weren’t real reviews. The online community of readers had been criticizing the lack of authenticity for some time and this video was the last straw. Read for the algorithm. Reading fans criticize the model that has been created with online recommendations. For several years now, the publishing industry has made these influencers a key resource to promote their launches, but with the passage of time, the volume of readings and the need to keep up to date with all the trendsis transforming reading from a leisurely and private activity to something manufactured for the “by weight” algorithm. The business works. Video reviews are giving publishers very good results, as in the case of the novel ‘The Last Quarter of the Moon’, which went from 600,000 copies to more than 6 million after a famous influencer recommended it. Large publishers allocate a specific budget and pay commissions of between 15 and 30% of the sales generated through their channels. The dependence on this promotional model is such that, according to editor Bai Bai, “In many cases, if no influencer is willing to take charge of a book or promote it, the book is practically doomed to failure at the moment of its publication.” A precarious job. Although publishers turn to these creators and give them good commissions, it does not mean that it is exactly a grateful job. There is enormous competition between creators, who have to constantly be up to date with trends in order to satisfy the algorithm and have their content go viral. Still, income is very unstable, pushing creators to post more reviews and exaggerate the impact the books have had on them. Anqian Reads, one of these bookfluencers, says “The ironic thing is that since I’ve been a book influencer, I have less time to read.” Image | 愚木混株 Yumu in Unsplash In Xataka | Universities are discovering something: fewer and fewer students are reading long essays without losing concentration

China is responsible for 3 of the 4 worst space debris episodes of the 21st century and a latest event shows that it is not getting better

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On June 9, the Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket released two satellites into low Earth orbit without any incident. With this, the upper stage of the rocket had already completed its mission. China does not reuse rockets, how SpaceX doesFor example. However, like any other space company, whether private or public, it has the obligation to try to ensure that its discarded rockets do not pose a risk to its space neighborhood or to the Earth itself. Unfortunately, the Asian country is not very efficient at preventing this from happening. Therefore, it is not entirely surprising that the upper stage of Zhuque-2E ended up exploding, violently ejecting more than 100 pieces at a dangerous distance from the International Space Station and much of Starlink satellites. By the hair. A United States Space Force dedicated to inspecting space for possible dangerous activities was the one that raised the alarm about this event. Not many details were given, other than that the person responsible for the explosion had been the Zhuque-2E rocket, with an upper stage 8 meters long and 3.35 meters in diameter. However, Darren McKnight, senior technical researcher at the orbital intelligence company LeoLabs, did venture to calculate in statements to Ars Technica that the explosion would have possibly released between 100 and 150 debris into low Earth orbit. The highest part of the orbit in which everything happened intersects the orbit of the International Space Station. However, the residual atmospheric resistance would be pushing the debris beneath it, so it would not pose a danger to it. The same cannot be said for the Starlink satellites, many of which are still quite close to some of the fragments from the explosion. Fortunately, also because of the residual atmospheric resistance, this debris will continue to fall, so that in a few months it should re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up into much smaller fragments that would no longer pose a risk. Many fear China. The experts They have been warning for years on China’s role in generating space debris. Currently, Russia and the former Soviet Union lead the list of launch-related debris into long-duration orbits. They are followed by China and the United States. However, while Russia and the United States are decreasing these numbers more and more, the number of this type of fragments associated with the Chinese space race has increased by 150% in the last 5 years. 3 of 4 dangerous events. A good example of the risk China poses in this regard is that it is responsible for 3 of the 4 largest explosive debris release events in low Earth orbit during the 21st century. The first of them took place in 2007, with Fengyun-1C. This was an anti-satellite test, so a kinetic destruction vehicle was used to deliberately hit a Chinese weather observation satellite. 3,500 pieces of debris were released. On the other hand, in 2022 and 2024 there were explosions in the upper stage of a Long March 6A rocket. It was something similar to what has happened now, although more fragments were formed. 500 in 2022 and between 700 and 900 in 2024. The only case that is not Chinese. The fourth of these dangerous events was another anti-satellite test, but this time carried out by Russia. This is how the Cosmos 1408 satellite was destroyedwith the subsequent release of 1,800 fragments. Space debris is an increasingly serious problem The solutions. All companies releasing inactive vehicles into low-Earth orbit or geostationary orbit should do everything possible to prevent them from becoming dangerous fragments. On the one hand, you can try to make a controlled deorbitation so that the objects return to Earth, without losing control over them. Passivation can also be carried out, in which the tanks are emptied of fuel to prevent explosions from occurring due to pressurization. Possibly, what has happened in China is due to the fact that some residual fuel has remained. Rockets or satellites can also be sent from geostationary orbit to a graveyard orbit. This is a higher orbit, far from any operational orbit where there are satellites, spacecraft or facilities of any kind that are operational and could be impacted. Finally, if the object in question is in a very low orbit, it can be monitored until it deorbits naturally. China could do all this, but it does not seem to be investing enough in optimizing results. Beware of the domino effect. These types of events could be dangerous if they occur something known as Kessler syndrome. It is a phenomenon that begins when a fragment of space debris collides with another or with an active object, such as a satellite, breaking it and generating more fragments that in turn continue to collide. It would be a kind of domino effect that could cause serious damage to the entire space infrastructure that we have been deploying little by little. For all this, what happened with this latest Chinese rocket is a wake-up call to what could happen in the future. It is not a serious case, compared to others, but it still happens. If this country does not take action, the consequences will be increasingly dangerous. Image | 中国新闻社 | POT In Xataka | Orbital cleanup is no longer science fiction: the first regular space debris collection service will arrive in 2027

Chile approved a direct submarine cable to China. The decision unleashed a diplomatic scandal with the US in the middle of everything

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For decades, Chile has tried to reduce its digital dependence on North America. The arrival of China Mobile as an alternative seemed like a solution to all their problems with the laying of a submarine cable from Valparaíso to Hong Kong. However, the issue has led to a tremendous geopolitical mess that is difficult to deal with. All because the United States had not liked the move one bit. Dependent independence. Almost all of the submarine cable infrastructure that connects Chile with the rest of the world passes through US territory or is in the hands of North American technology companies such as Google, Meta or Amazon. When Chile sought a direct route to Asia, it found that the only viable option passed through China. And of course, that set off all the alarms in Washington. What was being negotiated. China Mobile, a Chinese state telecommunications company, presented a $500 million proposal to lay an underwater cable of about 20,000 kilometers between the Chilean city of Concón and Hong Kong. The project, called Chile-China Express, would have been the first transpacific data connection from Latin America to Asia without passing through North America. The Chilean Ministry of Telecommunications approved the proposal last January. Washington’s response. Just like share Rest of World, two days after Chile signed the concession decree, the ministry annulled it, alleging “a technical error.” According to the mediumChilean officials had been urgently summoned to the US embassy in Santiago. And on February 20, the State Department revoked the visas of the Minister of Transportation and Telecommunications, Juan Carlos Muñoz, along with two other senior officials in the sector. The official notification was that their actions had “compromised critical telecommunications infrastructure and undermined regional security.” Munoz explained to Rest of World that the sanction prevented him from visiting a key country for his work and that it had damaged his reputation. What Chile defended. From Chile’s perspective, the evaluation of the project was an ordinary procedure. Jorge Heine, former Chilean diplomat, pointed out to the environment that diversifying digital communication sources is essential to avoid outages caused by geopolitical tensions. “The State Department entered uncharted territory,” he said, by sanctioning officials for doing their jobs legally. The new president inherits the problem. The change of government on March 11 complicated the scenario even more. The previous president, Gabriel Boric, acknowledged having ordered the withdrawal of approval after threats from the United States about long-term consequences. His successor, the right-wing José Antonio Kast, came to power with the poisoned task of maintaining relations with China, his main trading partner, without raising blisters to the United States (which is his main foreign investor). Complicated. The US ambassador to Chile made it clear shortly after the inauguration that the Chinese cable was “ruled out.” The official position has become more nuanced. The Kast government initially counted on Google’s Humboldt cable, that will connect Chile with Australia in 2027made the China project unnecessary. But more recently, executive sources have acknowledged that the China Mobile project “continues to be evaluated.” Pedro Huichalaf, cybersecurity researcher and former secretary of telecommunications, explained to Rest of World that for Chile “it still makes sense to create redundancy” with a main and a secondary route to Asia. The geopolitical trap. The Google cable does not completely solve the problem. And according to point Heine, intelligence agreements between the United States and Australia mean that South American data trafficking to the Asia-Pacific will continue under American supervision. And there is already precedent for this, since after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s global surveillance programs, Brazil and the European Union accelerated the deployment of the EllaLink cable to connect directly and avoid passing through North America. How the board looks. China has been expanding its digital presence in Latin America. And the country operates 5G networks and data centers in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Argentina through companies such as China Telecom, Huawei, ZTE and Alibaba Cloud. Brazil, for its part, is promoting its own 35,000-kilometer cable that would connect with China, India, Russia and South Africa. Washington views each of these moves as a threat to its influence in the hemisphere. In fact, just as stands out In the middle, the so-called Donroe Doctrine of the Trump administration formalizes that position by not allowing “foreign adversaries” to use trade as a lever to control critical infrastructure in the region. And in the long term. Just like point Rest of World, the most solid solution for Chile is not to choose between Washington and Beijing, but to reduce dependence on both. Aisén Etcheverry, former Minister of Science and Technology in the Boric government and a technology consultant, told the media that “Latin America has built lasting relationships with a wide variety of partners. Although this provides resilience, it is not enough. Developing its own capabilities must be a priority.” Cover image | aboodi vesakaran and AI generation with Gemini In Xataka | An unexpected salvation for the end user emerges from the memory market debacle: Chinese chips

The US did not turn off Claude Mythos for fear of a jailbreak, it did so because it suspected someone was watching. That someone is China

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Last Saturday, the White House ordered Anthropic to remove access to Fable 5 and Mythos to any foreign person, regardless of whether they were inside or outside the United States. This order supposedly came after a tip that there was a way to jailbreak the model and bypass safeguards, but according to Wired it came at a time when Washington was already uneasy for another reason. South Korea. They tell it in Wired. According to sources close to the government, the notice of the possible jailbreak came at a time when the US government had already raised its eyebrows over another issue. It turns out that one of the large companies that had access to Mythosthe original model without the safeguards, was SK Telecom, the largest telephone operator in South Korea. The concern, according to these sources, arises from the alleged ties of this operator with China. The logic would have been something like: if SK Telecom has access, China has access. Furthermore, they have told us that there are vulnerabilities. Let them turn it off now. Why is it important. Until now it was believed that the reason behind the decision was the warning about a possible jailbreak in Fable, which was the “trimmed” version of Mythos that was released to the public. It was Amazon’s own CEO, Andy Jassy, ​​who called the treasury secretary to warn him that they had found vulnerabilities in Fable. In this version of the story, the government’s concern was that anyone would bypass Fable’s safeguards and use it for evil. However, with this new information things change: it is no longer just any person, but China, its great enemy in the technological war, which could be looking into the guts of Mythos. They already had them in their sights. As we said, SK Telecom was one of the 150 companies chosen to test Mythos within the framework of what is known as Project Glasswing. According to internal sources consulted by Wired, the US government requested that Anthropic revoke their access earlier this month, to which Anthropic agreed. It seemed like the thing was going to stay there, but when Fable was released to the public and learned that it had a vulnerability, the White House reacted. SK Telecom, Anthropic and China. The relationship between Anthropic and SK Telecom dates back to 2023, when They invested 100 million dollars in the AI ​​startup for the development of AI models focused on telecommunications. Currently, SK Telecom barely has a presence in China (They only have seven employees and their billing is testimonial), but in the past they had a very close relationship with China Unicom, creating a joint venture and investing up to $1 billion in the Chinese operator. Although already They sold their shares in 2009SK Telecom is part of the SK Group conglomerate, which has other businesses beyond telecommunications, such as semiconductors and energy, these with alliances in China. SK Telecom has denied maintaining ties with China. Previous tensions. All this happens at a time when the relationship between the US government and Anthropic is not going through its best moment. In March of this year they starred in a whole soap opera Anthropic’s refusal to allow military use of its models without safeguards. They ended up on what is known as the black list.Anthropic took the US to court and now we have a new season of the soap opera with the whole Mythos thing. Image | Xataka with Magnific In Xataka | China has two ideas to win the AI ​​race: invest a fortune and leave NVIDIA with almost no margin

The new Chinese gem of semiconductors is called Enflame. This is the new member of “the four chip dragons” of China

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The name Enflame may not ring a bell yet. But it is very likely that in the coming months it will end up giving us a lot to talk about. And this Chinese AI chip company just got the go-ahead to go public on the STAR market in Shanghai, the preferred market for the country’s large technology companies. After this, we see how the scheme of large chip manufacturers begins to take shape. Enflame enters the select group of the four big technology companies that are dedicated to AI chipsand that are already listed or are about to do so on the public markets. Who is Enflame and where does it come from? The company was founded in Shanghai in 2018 by Zhao Lidong, an engineer who came from AMD, where he led the development of high-performance processors at the American company’s R&D center. Together with his co-founder Zhang Yalin, Zhao set out to replicate that knowledge in Chinese territory and build a domestic alternative to Nvidia. In seven years has developed five AI chips distributed across four generations of architecture, and has built a catalog that includes processors, accelerator cards, computing clusters and software platforms. Its most recent chip, the L600 module, has passed silicon verification testing, although it has not yet entered large-scale commercial production. Why this IPO matters. Enflame plans to raise up to 6 billion yuan (about 888 million dollars) selling between 10% and 15% of its shares. The money, as could not be otherwise in these times, will be used to accelerate the development of its next generation of AI chips in the cloud and build the software that surrounds them. However, the operation also has a certain symbolic character, since it is the fourth and final addition to the group known as the “four little dragons” of Chinese chips. The other three (Moore Threads, Biren Technology and MetaX) have already debuted on the STAR market, and have been received enthusiastically by investors. In fact, Moore Threads, nicknamed “the Chinese Nvidia”, rose 425% on its first day of trading in December of last year, according to Bloomberg. Restrictions. The reason China is betting so big on these manufacturers is that the United States has been applying restrictions on chip exports for years advanced towards the Asian giant. Nvidia’s most powerful models are blocked, which has created a real shortage in the Chinese market and a strategic urgency to develop its own alternatives. Beijing has responded with public moneyincluding a relaxation of STAR board rules to allow loss-making companies to list, and a $295 billion plan to build data centers that do not depend on American chips. In this framework, Enflame and its groupmates become part of an infrastructure of technological sovereignty. What does it look like? Tencent. Enflame’s greatest asset is also its greatest vulnerability. Tencent owns about 20% of the company and in 2025 it represented 84% of its income, compared to 38% the previous year. That is, almost everything that Enflame sells is bought by Tencent. The Chinese tech giant uses its chips to power large-scale data centers, recommendation systems, chatbots and generative AI infrastructure. The company itself acknowledged in its IPO prospectus that “Tencent’s demand has far exceeded its supply capacity.” That’s good in the short term, as it guarantees income. But how they point out In The Next Web, a chip maker that relies on a single customer for the majority of its sales ends up being exposed if that customer changes priorities. The numbers. Enflame is growing at breakneck speed, as revenues have multiplied a compound rate greater than 80% between 2023 and 2025, but still in losses. Net losses were reduced to 1.2 billion yuan in 2025, compared to 1.5 billion the previous year, and the company plans to close the first half of 2026 with losses of about 600 million yuan. For the same period, it expects its revenue to grow more than three times compared to the previous year, reaching between 10.6 billion and 11.5 billion yuan. On the other hand, investment in R&D has exceeded 100% of sales over the last three years, which says a lot about the phase the company is in (still building, not harvesting). Before the IPO, the Hurun Index valued the company at around $2.8 billion. Where Enflame fits in. Not all dragons are the same. Within China, Enflame competes in a market where Huawei and Cambricon They continue to be the benchmarks in the sector and are already profitable. Enflame, Moore Threads, Biren and Iluvatar CoreX make up a second, younger layer that is trying to break through. Technically, Enflame has opted for application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), a more specialized architecture, rather than the general-purpose GPUs used by Moore Threads or Biren. Xu Dawei, of Jintong Private Fund Management in Beijing, points out Bloomberg that Enflame “benefits from solid comparatives,” given that its Chinese competitors are already listed on the stock market with valuations well above what their revenues would justify. Companies like ByteDance are actively looking for domestic alternatives to Nvidiaand second-tier manufacturers, including Enflame, are on the radar. Cover image | Enflame In Xataka | TSMC is on the ropes and its biggest problem is not competition: it is water

China has a quantum platform for computing. Now he wants to turn it into an “attack and defense” system.

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For years we have talked about quantum computing as holding the promise of calculation: machines capable of tackling problems that conventional computers cannot solve, or cannot solve at a useful speed. But that same promise also opens a security front that is difficult to ignore. If sufficiently powerful quantum computers ever exist, part of the encryption that sustains our digital lives could be left in a delicate position. That is why the case of Origin Wukong is interesting: the story coming from China not only seeks to show the ability to calculate, it also wants to present it as a piece of cryptographic defense. What is Origin Wukong. The name may lead one to imagine a specific machine, but the case is something more similar to a remotely available quantum computing platform. According to Global TimesOrigin Wukong is part of a Chinese series of superconducting quantum computers and is linked to the Origin Quantum environment and the quantum research carried out in Anhui, in eastern China. The data that gives it dimension is not only technical: the statement collected by the media speaks of more than 1 million quantum computing tasks completed, more than 49 million remote visits from 192 countries and regions. The new defensive layer. The novelty is not only in the use that Origin Wukong has accumulated, but in how that infrastructure is now presented. The media claims that the platform has integrated a post-quantum cryptography framework and that this allows it to offer a double capacity, aimed at both computing and security. The text itself speaks of “defensive security measures”, an early “spear and shield” model and an “attack and defense” system. What post-quantum cryptography means. We are not talking about an automatic solution or a technology that makes any system invulnerable. According to NISTpost-quantum cryptography is based on encryption methods supported by mathematical problems that are difficult to solve both for conventional computers and for future quantum computers. The nuance matters because the risk is not in current everyday equipment, but in a generation of quantum processors much more powerful than those available today. That is the logic that allows us to understand why Origin Wukong is now also presented in a defensive key. Why does it matter anymore?. The problem does not only affect military documents or state secrets. NIST reminds us that encryption protects everything from emails and medical records to banking, e-commerce, personal photos and sensitive information of governments and companies. In addition, there is a particularly uncomfortable threat: that of capturing encrypted data today to try to decrypt it in the future, when more capable quantum machines exist. That is why the transition cannot be left to the last minute: integrating new algorithms into products and services can take between 10 and 20 years. Technical caution. All this does not mean that quantum computing has already solved its major obstacles. NIST reminds that the field is still in an early phase and that there are still significant challenges before building quantum computers powerful enough to break current encryption. IBM also highlights one of the best-known barriers: qubits are delicate, require extreme cooling conditions and can lose stability due to decoherence. Images | Anhui Quantum Computing Research Center In Xataka | Microsoft believed it would take decades to have a useful quantum computer. Majorana 2 just pushed that deadline to 2029

“China sets the pace in technology, costs and development times. We have to learn from them”

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Company with problems, company that looks to China. Not so much to sell more cars in a very complicated market (that too), much more to see how to learn from them and get greater performance from their products. Survive by achieving wider profit margins by producing cheaper and faster. For Nissan, China holds the key. “We have to learn” “China shows us the future of the industry in terms of technology, cost competitiveness and development times. We have to learn from China and export its technical knowledge” This is what Iván Espinosa, CEO of Nissan, has expressed in statements Nikkei Asia. In an interview with the Japanese media, Espinosa has made it clear that Nissan needs to copy China if it wants to survive. The Japanese automaker is going through a very bad economic time and to get out of the hole it wants to look at its neighbor. https://www.xataka.com/movilidad/nissan-leaf-opiniones-primera-toma-contacto-fotos What’s wrong with Nissan? Nissan is going through one of the worst financial and reputational moments in its history. At the end of 2024, the company accepted that it had entered a stalemate from which it would be difficult to get out. Sales were declining, the US market (with its tariffs on Japanese cars) It got complicated, at home they didn’t get back on their feet and in China they were missing. Solution: lay off 9,000 employees. Those days, after a few days of rumors (and everything indicates that with the Japanese Government putting pressure), Nissan and Honda announced an agreement to unite their paths. The idea, it seemed, was that the second company would take over Nissan and take it under its umbrella. That idea was dissolved just a few months later.. We now know that Honda gave, for the first time in its history, losses in 2025 and that its strategy has focused on canceling its electrical projects. In March of last year, the Mexican Iván Espinosa took control of Nissan and has focused its future proposal on a new launch plan and the objective of recovering part of its prestige. Last year, the company continued to lose sales worldwide but the 13% drop in Japan is especially worrying. Reduce times. For Espinosa, one of Nissan’s big problems is in the development and production times of its models. Right now, he explains, the development of a car from when it is drawn on paper and given the go-ahead until it reaches the street is 55 months. Espinosa wants to reduce this to about 30 months. According to their calculations, these long developments prevent them from getting the economic performance they need from their cars and that is why they have proposed that the next Nissan Skyline, the return of a legendary model of the company, has set a deadline for its development of 26 months, they point out in Nikkei Asia. China has demonstrated an ability to develop, modify and produce in record time. Renault has also gone to China to learn how they work there and they presume that The Renault Twingo was developed in 20 months. From Chery they already made it clear that its high capacity to develop and produce in record time is key when it comes to prevailing over Western competitors. More and more notices. These statements by Espinosa demonstrate that traditional firms are doing everything possible to quickly adapt to China’s way of working. Some consultants have already pointed out Japanese brands that their obsession with perfection hinders them when it comes to producing faster and cheaper, which has been taken advantage of by Tesla and Chinese companies. Toyota also sent a similar message a few weeks ago. The company has detected that it is losing money because products with aesthetic defects are sometimes discarded even though these parts are fully functional and are never seen by vehicle customers. This weighs on their production costs but also on the time it takes to produce the car. More cars, more prestige. Account Nikkei Asia that Espinosa’s project involves launching new cars on the market that update the company’s range of products but, above all, it will be based on the search for its own identity with a clear intention of recovering the lost prestige. In fact, in recent weeks it has been rumored that Nissan could bring the latest Z to Europe (now only sold in Japan and the United States so as not to penalize the company’s emissions count) with the aim of attracting the public to the dealership and positioning it as a halo product. On the horizon is also the new Skyline and a future GT-R that has gone through all possible phases when it comes to defining it and moving it forward, from project it as an electric sports car to launch it again with a combustion engine. “We will provide more details in the future,” Espinosa said on this topic. The CEO of Nissan has even referred to the fact that “some of my predecessors only talked about finances all the time”, in a clear message that not everything can be done to save costs if you want to maintain the attractive image of the product. A move that diluted Nissan’s imagethat Stellantis ballast and an idea that Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota, has also rejected. Photo | nissan In Xataka | “We will not survive”: Toyota wants to add the turbo to match the pace of the Chinese brands

BYD wants to dethrone Toyota in five years. The problem is that first he has to fix what is happening in China

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Wang Chuanfu, president of BYD, has full confidence that the next few years are going to be big for the company. However, the price of its shares is not following to the company’s exploits, and for that reason it has sent a message that is intended, above all, for its investors: the promise of becoming the world’s leading manufacturer in terms of scale. Wang spoke about the issue at the Chinese company’s annual shareholders meeting, held in Shenzhen on June 9. His words come at a delicate moment, since BYD’s actions have fallen more than 45% from its highs in Hong Kong in the last year, and 33% on the Shenzhen stock market. In fact, his promise failed to convince, as the next day, shares fell another 4.3% in Hong Kong and 1.6% in Shenzhen. This is how things are at BYD. Target: Toyota. BYD is already the largest electric car manufacturer in the world by sales, having surpassed Tesla last year. But Wang’s objective goes further, as he wants BYD become number one global in total vehicle volume, ahead of Toyota. And precisely, to achieve this, it would have to sell more than double what it is selling now. In 2025, Toyota sold 11.3 million vehicles; BYD, 4.8 million. The distance is enormous. Technology. At the meeting, Wang assured that the second generation Blade battery was the main growth bottleneck this year and has pledged to accelerate its production. He also highlighted the advances in ultra-fast charging, since this week BYD announced an investment of about 2,000 million euros in Europe to develop its Flash Charge infrastructure, with 1,500 kW of power and that would allow its cars to be charged from 10% to 70% in just 5 minutes. The firm showed it to us last April, when we were able to attend the official presentation of the Denza Z9GT. Along with this, the president of the company claimed that BYD has 3.15 million vehicles with intelligent driving already in circulation, accumulating 200 million kilometers of data per day, and that L3 and L4 level autonomous driving will arrive “sooner than expected.” “As soon as the regulation is ready, BYD will take off quickly,” Wang said. A domestic problem. The great tension of the moment is precisely at home. And the Chinese market, where BYD does most of its business, has become fiercely competitive. The price war between local manufacturers has pressured margins and hampered sales. Between January and May of this year, total deliveries fell more than 20% compared to the same period of the previous year, according to account Reuters. This internal bleeding is what worries investors, and no promises about Toyota have covered it up for now. Your business away from home. Exports are the other side of the coin, and there the panorama is different. In the first five months of the year, international sales grew 65% year-on-yearwith Brazil, the United Kingdom and Australia as the main destinations. In May alone, BYD sold more than 160,000 vehicles outside China, 80% more than in the same month of 2025. The goal for 2026 is to exceed one and a half million units exported, which would represent an increase of more than 40% over the 1.05 million last year. According to share According to CarNewsChina, Wang admitted at the meeting that the current trend aims to exceed even the initial goal of 1.6 million. Europe, opportunity and problems. The firm knows that to achieve its objectives, Europe is key to its expansion. Stella Li, chief international officer of BYD, confirmed to Reuters that the hungary plant will begin assembling cars in the fourth quarter of this year. Manufacturing locally is essential if you want to avoid the tariffs that the European Union has imposed on Chinese electric companies. However, the Hungarian factory is attracting some controversy, since organizations such as China Labor Watch have reported alleged violations of European labor legislation, and local authorities have sanctioned three companies linked to its construction for dumping excavation soils on surrounding agricultural land. The matter remains open. The shadow of the Pentagon. As if the problems in the stock market and the pressure in its domestic market were not enough, this week the United States Department of Defense added BYD to its list of “Chinese military companies”considering it a risk to national security. Beijing responded by calling the decision without a factual basis. BYD does not operate in the US market due to existing tariffsbut the label complicates its image and its possible future movements in that market. In Xataka | A German driver set out to discover how much he could stretch the tank of his old diesel car. And he has done 2,400 kilometers

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