Chinese

China only wants Chinese appliances. So Samsung has had to change its strategy

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Samsung entered China in 1994 with a television factory in Tianjin. In 2006 led the Chinese TV market selling three million units of its Bordeaux model annually. Twenty years later, its share in televisions is 3.62%. The story of Samsung in China is the story of how a market can build its own champions and expel outsiders without having to close the doors. Strategic change in Samsung’s commercial policy in China. Rumors about an exit in its home appliance division were on the table since April, and at the beginning of May the company itself has confirmed it. Samsung is withdrawing from the home appliance market in China to focus on mobile phones and semiconductors. what has happened. Samsung leaves the Chinese market for home appliances and home products. Televisions, AC systems, refrigerators, washing machines, audio equipment and all home-related products will no longer be sold in China. The company will maintain after-sales and warranty services and will continue to “continue to comply with relevant laws and regulations” of consumer protection. “The company will do everything possible to minimize any impact on customers arising from this decision and is reviewing various support measures for its business partners.” The reasons. Samsung has communicated that the decision comes after a “prudent study”, without going into excessive detail about the reasons why it is abandoning the Chinese market in this product category. Despite this, it is clear that the numbers have had something to do with it. Samsung barely had a 3.62% market share in televisions, and did not reach 1% in categories such as refrigerators or washing machines. China is a country in which the local market has greater weight than in any other territory, and the rise of manufacturers such as Hisense, TCL or Xiaomi in these product categories has been noticeable. The Chinese market. The Chinese home appliance market is dominated by domestic manufacturers. In refrigeration, Haier has a 45% share, followed by places like Midea and Hisense. Chinese brands control more than 90% of the television market in Chinawith an important boost in the form of state subsidies. This 2026 is being a year of important renewal cyclewith subsidized exchange programs in order to boost sales of local products. And now what. Samsung’s plan is not to completely close itself to China. It will continue to sell smartphones, tablets and accessories, although for years it has not risen to a top 5 in which only Apple manages to sneak among the national giants. The question that remains in the air is not whether Samsung has lost China. It is whether what has happened in household appliances is a dress rehearsal for what can happen to the rest of the Western manufacturers with a presence in China. In Xataka | The last thing I expected in 2025 was to have a party and for the refrigerator to become a karaoke

The European Union is very clear about the future of its network infrastructure: there will not be a single Chinese device

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Europe is intensifying its battle against Chinese equipment, both in its electrical network and in its telecommunications infrastructure. The European Commission has again recommended earlier this week the exclusion of Huawei and ZTE equipment by local telecommunications operators, paving the way for a review of the Cybersecurity Regulation in which it is proposed mandatory elimination of high-risk suppliers. A new touch. The European Commission has started the week with a reminder: member states must exclude Huawei and ZTE equipment from their telecommunications network. In January of this year, Europe published a draft establishing the mandatory withdrawal of “high-risk suppliers”, posing a formal veto on Chinese telecommunications companies. It is a particularly sensitive issue in Spain, where communities like Catalonia have ignored European recommendations and they have renewed again recently with companies that use Huawei equipment. The Generalitat case. Last March, the Generalitat of Catalonia renewed its contract with XCAT. A budget of 127 million euros to maintain Huawei as the main equipment supplier, despite the EU notice and challenges from Telefónica and Cellnex that paralyzed the process for a few weeks. {“videoId”:”x9gqo70″,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”YOU ARE NOT GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR MOBILE if you are not using AI like this”, “tag”:”Webedia-prod”, “duration”:”617″} In addition to the Catalan case, practically a third of Spanish 5G networks are from Huawei, with an estimated replacement cost between 400 and 1,000 million euros. Beyond. It is not the only measure that Europe wants to implement against Chinese suppliers. The Commission also wants to protect itself in relation to renewable energies, vetoing access to community funds to those projects using converters made in China. “Our risk assessments have confirmed threats, including manipulation of electricity production parameters, interruption of electricity generation and even unauthorized access to operational data. In practice, this could mean a blackout, a remote blackout of Member States’ networks leading to nationwide power outages.” As with the network infrastructure, according to the Commission, this measure responds to a shield for security reasons, applicable from next November 1. Again, a blow to the giant Huawei, one of the main suppliers of solar inverters in Spain. In Xataka 6G is not being developed to improve mobile speed: it is geopolitics and China is going with the accelerator to the table The Chinese response. China is no stranger to the measures being prepared by Europe, and has made it clear that it considers these proposed acts to be discriminatory and harmful to trade. Without detailing his plans, he has made it clear that he will take countermeasures. The Swedish case. Decisions have consequences, and Sweden is a country that knows very well what happens if you ban Huawei on your telecommunications equipment. In 2020, the country banned the use of telecommunications equipment from Chinese manufacturers under the argument of national security. Although a priori this was a lifeline for Ericsson, the consequences were just the opposite. China retaliated, and China Mobile expelled Eriscsson from its network infrastructure, going from 11% market share to 2%. In case Europe hits China again. In Xataka | There is a crucial technology for the deployment of AI and China is also securing the lead: 6G (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 The European Union is very clear about the future of its network infrastructure: there will not be a single Chinese device was originally published in Xataka by Ricardo Aguilar .

Chinese electric cars already have massages, karaoke and even a refrigerator. The next step is an under-seat toilet.

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If you can’t hold back the urge to urinate while you’re in the car, the normal thing to do is wait until you make a stop at the next gas station to relieve yourself. That’s normal, and then there is Seres, the Chinese manufacturer of Aito cars, which has patented a rather peculiar solution: add a toilet integrated into the cabin that unfolds like a drawer. Exploring other areas. China has one of the most saturated electric car markets and competitive on the planet. Dozens of brands fight for the same type of audience and differentiation has become a race without limits: from massage seats and karaoke systems, even integrated refrigerators, giant screens…If everyone is doing the same thing in infotainment, why not explore the next territory? And this seems to be the conclusion reached by Seres, the Chongqing-based company that manufactures Aito brand vehicles. A portable toilet. According to they count From CarNewsChina, the Intellectual Property Administration of China granted Seres authorization for this patent on April 10. The device consists of a toilet integrated under the passenger seat that is extracted using a system of sliding rails (something similar to a drawer) manually or by voice commands. When not in use, it is completely hidden under the seat, without taking up additional space in the cabin. How it works inside. According to collect The BBC, which had access to the original document presented to the Chinese authorities, the system includes a fan and an extraction tube to evacuate odors to the outside of the vehicle. The waste is collected in a tank that must be emptied manually. In addition, it incorporates a rotating heater that evaporates urine and dries solids. Is for when the car is stopped. Before too vivid mental images arise, it is worth clarifying: the design is designed so that you stop as soon as possible and start with the task. According to CarNewsChinaSeres’ own engineers specify in the patent report that the objective is “to satisfy the needs of users during long journeys, camping or during prolonged stays in the vehicle.” Endless traffic jams, overnight stops or campsites without facilities are the intended use cases. It’s not as crazy as it seems. Toilets in cars are very rare, but it would not be the first time they have been seen in a car. In fact, just as account BBC, in the 1950s, a special version of the Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith already included a toilet under the back seat. There are also those who have modified their car to include one, such as this owner of a Toyota 4Runner. What Seres is proposing now is, in essence, a more technologically sophisticated version of an idea that already existed seventy years ago. Obstacles. Just because the patent exists does not mean that it will reach production. CarNewsChina points out several important technical obstacles, including integrating drainage pipes into compact chassis (especially in electric ones where the battery occupies a large part of the floor), guaranteeing the durability of the rails or achieving an airtight seal that prevents odor leaks. And then there’s the psychological barrier, which is basically convincing passengers that it’s perfectly normal to use the bathroom just inches from where the rest of the family sits. Seres is not going through its best moment. The company is going through a difficult time. According to data of China EV DataTracker, deliveries of Aito M9its high-end SUV, have fallen 44.2% year-on-year for three consecutive months. Seres and Huawei plan to soon launch a renewed version of the model to stop the decline. And in this context, these types of patents can help the brand, not even to make them a reality, but to try to generate conversation around its vehicles. Cover image | Polestones and Aito In Xataka | You buy a second-hand car, you pay for it and the police confiscate it: this is how the ‘twin’ car scam works

the ingenious Chinese system so that Martian bases do not run out of power

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Traveling to Mars and establishing human colonies there is a challenge on many levels. The simple fact of arriving is already a problem, but the handicaps do not disappear once there. Without food, water or electricity, Martian colonizers would have to live in an inhospitable place, with a poisonous atmosphere and deadly cosmic radiation. Protective shields could be used and even grow tomatoesaccording to the Chinese. But we continue with the energy problem. Of course, there are already some interesting proposals. And also from the Chinese, by the way. MARS-MONTH. This year, a team of Chinese scientists has made his proposal particular to supply the Martian colonizers with energy. It is a system that uses carbon dioxide (CO2), which accounts for 96% of the composition of the red planet’s atmosphere. On Mars the pressure is very low, so very little energy would be needed to compress CO2 and use it to obtain electricity. This energy would be obtained from a nuclear reactor and the process would be so efficient that there would still be excess heat, so it could be used to catalyze chemical reactions such as obtaining oxygen by breaking down CO2 molecules or obtaining methane from hydrogen and more carbon dioxide. Better than nuclear energy. In reality, nuclear fission has already positioned itself as one of the preferred energy sources for the future of the space race. For example, it could be useful for boost spaceships far away, to places where solar energy is not an option and the fuels loaded on Earth are insufficient. It has also been thought that it could be used to supply energy to the lunar bases and Martians. However, there is a problem. The fuel cells used in this type of reactors They must be changed every 10 years approximately if you work with them at full capacity. Perhaps it would be feasible on the Moon, where the one-way trip lasts just a few days. However, the nine months that are needed today to go to Mars is too long to be able to make adequate replacements. Furthermore, to this we must add that The launch windows to be able to make a launch occur every 26 months. It is very unviable. Better to diversify. In reality, we have already seen that MARS-MES also starts from nuclear energy. However, very little energy is used to compress carbon dioxide and, from there, electricity and other fuels, such as methane, are obtained. The system does not rely solely on fissile fuels, so the stack should last much longer. There is still a long way to go. The scientists who have devised this system themselves recognize that there are still decades to go before having the necessary technologies to carry it out. Even so, when it comes to something so complex, it is always good to start working on the process well in advance. Even when it is still totally impossible to do it. China is flying. The Asian country has become a major contender in the space race. It is hot on NASA’s heels with the Moon and has a lot of interest in Mars. In addition, it has its own space station: Tiangong. Regarding the red planet, China’s next step will be the Tianwen-3 mission, which will travel to Mars in 2028, in order to collect samples from its surface and bring them to Earth in 2031. If everything goes well, it would be the first time something like this has been achieved. With or without MARS-MES, they are well on their way to Mars. Image | Magnificent In Xataka | While NASA faces the cancellation of 41 missions, China is doing real wonders in space

The US remains committed to stopping China. Now it has targeted the second largest Chinese chip manufacturer

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SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp) is the largest Chinese semiconductor manufacturer with a global market share 5.32%. Only TSMC and Samsung surpass it. Currently this is the only Chinese company that has the necessary technology to manufacture 7nm integrated circuitsbut Hua Hong Semiconductor, China’s second largest chip producer, is developing the technology necessary to manufacture this class of semiconductors. The US Department of Commerce has confirmed without intending it that Hua Hong Semiconductor is very serious with its 7nm photolithography. And it has done so because, according to Reutershas notified the most important lithography and wafer processing equipment manufacturers in the US that they no longer have permission to deliver their most advanced machines to this Chinese company. The purpose of this US entity is clear: it aims to make it difficult for Hua Hong Semiconductor to conclude the development of its 7nm lithography. Lam Research, Applied Materials and KLA already have one more obstacle in China Department of Commerce technicians analyze export requests within the framework established by current regulations and approve or deny the sale of integrated circuits and wafer processing equipment to China. The current regulation is the most effective tool at the disposal of the US Government to try to slow down the development of China’s semiconductor industry and prevent it from acquiring the capacity to manufacture cutting-edge integrated circuits in the short or medium term. Hua Hong is preparing to start production of 7nm chips at its Shanghai plant Hua Hong Semiconductor’s division specializing in third-party chip manufacturing is called Huali Microelectronics, and it is preparing to launch the production of 7nm integrated circuits at its Shanghai plant. The sources that have revealed this information assure that Huawei has collaborated with Huali Microelectronics on this project, which invites us to reach two reasonable conclusions. The first is that Huali’s 7nm lithography is likely to play an essential role in GPU production capacity for artificial intelligence (AI) from both Huawei and other Chinese companies. And the second conclusion is actually a plausible hypothesis. And, like SMIC, Huali does not have access to ASML SVU teams. For this reason, it is very likely that with the help of Huawei it has developed security techniques. multiple patterning to be able to manufacture 7nm chips with the UVP machines in its possession. Lam Research, Applied Materials and KLA are three of the US companies that the Commerce Department has notified that they can no longer provide Hua Hong Semiconductor with their most advanced wafer processing equipment. China is a very important market for these companies, so presumably they are going to lose several billions of dollars in sales. Lin Jian, the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has declared that his country expects the United States to stabilize global industrial and supply chains and keep trade functioning normally. Image | TSMC More information | Reuters In Xataka | TSMC is already the highest-earning chipmaker on the planet. It has beaten two semiconductor giants

China is preparing the most powerful and rare exascale supercomputer on the planet. No GPU: only Chinese CPUs

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An exascale supercomputer is one capable of performing at least 1 exaflop (10¹⁸) of floating point operations per second. These machines are the most powerful currently available if we stick to classic computers and leave aside the prototypes of quantum computers. The classification TOP500 identifies the most capable supercomputers on the planetand, as expected, four exascale machines appear at the top of this list: The Captain, FrontierAurora and Jupiter. The first three reside in the United States and the fourth in Germany. Curiously, no Chinese supercomputer appears in the top ten positions of this classification, although we know that some of its most powerful machines are not officially reported to the TOP500 for geopolitical reasons. Be that as it may, the Government led by Xi Jinping is determined to change this scenario. And the Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center has announced that is going to build a supercomputer called Lingshen that, according to this institution, will have a sustained performance of more than 2 exaflops and will integrate only components designed and manufactured in China. Lingshen supercomputer architecture is very unusual The supercomputer ‘The Captain’ from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA) is a real beast. This machine exceeds 1.8 exaflops, making it currently the most powerful on the planet. The APUs are responsible for its brute force. Instinct MI300A from AMD, which work hand in hand with the EPYC 9005 processors. However, the most surprising thing is that it brings together no less than 11,340,000 cores and delivers 1,809 PFlops/s Rmax and 2,821.10 PFlops/s Rpeak. Lingshen will bring together 47,000 processors of Chinese origin that will be distributed in Huawei Kunpeng servers The architecture of ‘El Capitan’ is very similar to that of the other supercomputers in the TOP500 classification, but the machine being prepared by the Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center is going to take different paths. And it is that according to Lu Yutongthe director of this center, the Lingshen supercomputer will use only general purpose processors (CPU), and will not use GPU. Not a single one. It is a very unusual decision, and it is surprising that in theory it will exceed 2 exaflops only with this type of chips. Be that as it may, this is not the only thing we know. Lingshen will bring together 47,000 processors of Chinese origin that will be distributed in servers Huawei Kunpeng equipped with Taishan cores with ARM architecture. Lu Yutong has also confirmed that this machine will have 650PB of storage and a million-port interconnection. Everything that the Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center has announced sounds great, but this project also leaves us with some very reasonable doubts. The most obvious is that Lingshen is just a project at the moment. It has not yet been built, so its theoretical maximum performance comes from an estimate and not from a measurement provided by a real test bench. On the other hand, it is very surprising that the Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center has chosen to integrate only CPU. Huawei, Moore Threads and Cambricon Technologies are three of the chinese companies which have domestically made GPUs that could presumably fit into this machine. In any case, it is worth keeping track of this project to see if Lingshen finally lives up to the expectations it has raised. Image | TOP500.org More information | Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center In Xataka | The Frontier supercomputer is the second most powerful exascale machine on the planet. And it has a mission: nuclear fusion

DeepSeek has just released a model that competes with Opus 4.6. It costs seven times less and runs on Chinese chips

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They have passed 484 days since that “DeepSeek moment“, but the wait It seems to have been worth it, because we have the new DeepSeek V4 with us. We are facing an absolutely gigantic open weights model that once again promises to crack the foundations of the proprietary foundational models of Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. This is moving, gentlemen. Gigantic and open. DeepSeek v4 is an Open Source model and comes in two versions. The first is the Pro, with 1.6 trillion parameters (1.6T), of which it has 49,000 million active. The second is Flash, with 248,000 million parameters (248B, huge for a “Flash” model) of which 13,000 are active. More efficient than ever. Both versions they make use of a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, which means that only a fraction of the parameters are activated in each inference. This allows the computational cost to be reduced significantly. Both versions support a context window of one million tokens—to include novels and novels at once as input—when in v3 it was 128,000 tokens. Furthermore, this model is much more efficient than its predecessor in computing per token: it requires only 27% of the operations per token and 10% of the KV cache compared to DeepSeek v3.2. Benchmarks promise. DeepSeek’s internal testing reveals that v4 Pro-Max (the best model with the highest reasoning ability) outperforms or is on par with Claude Opus 4.6 Max, GPT-5.4 xHigh, Gemini 3.1 Pro High, Kimi K2.6 and GLM 5.1. The results, however, are not independently verified, which means we should take them with caution. The numbers are still striking: in LiveCodeBench, a programming test, DeepSeek v4-Pro-Max achieves a 93.5% score compared to 88.8 for Opus 4.6 and 91.7% for Gemini 3.1 Pro. In other tests there is more variability, but at least on paper DeepSeek v4 Pro seems as good as Opus 4.7, which until now was the absolute benchmark. Much cheaper. But as happened with its previous version, the difference in price with those models from US companies is astonishing. As point the analyst Simon Willinson, the official prices of DeepSeek v4 Pro are 1.74 dollars per million input tokens and 3.48 dollars per million output tokens, up to almost seven times less than those of Opus 4.7 and up to almost 9 times less than those of the new GPT-5.5. With DeepSeek v4 Flash the cost is 0.14/0.28 dollars per million input/output tokens, when GPT-5.4 Mini costs up to 16 times more. The conclusion is obvious: if it really does what it says it does, the price is an absolute bargain. That is precisely the challenge: that real experience confirms what the benchmarks say. The hardware mystery. DeepSeek has not revealed what hardware has been used to train this version of its founding model. In the past they did admit that they had used NVIDIA’s H800s. Which yes it is known The thing is that the model has been developed to run on both NVIDIA and Huawei Ascend chips. This last has confirmed Baidu that its Ascend Supernode clusters based on the Ascend 950 will fully support DeepSeek v4 versions. Huawei support is “horrible” news for the US. In The Information they already commented that one of the reasons for the “delay” in the appearance of this model was to adapt it so that it worked without problems with Huawei chips. That support is according to Jensen Huang “horrible” news for the US, because it means that dependence on NVIDIA chips no longer exists or at least is reduced to a minimum. But. The launch comes at a difficult time for the company. Guo Daya, one of the people responsible for the v1 and v3 models, has signed for ByteDance to work on AI agents. Luo Fuli, who led the development of v2, joined Xiaomi last year. This launch also coincides with DeepSeek seeking external funding for the first time. They are expected to raise about $300 million and obtain a valuation of about $20 billion. according to The Wall Street Journal. From the surprise effect to the continuity effect. The launch of DeepSeek R1 in January 2025 was surprising because it demonstrated that China could train competitive models at a fraction of the cost of Western models. With DeepSeek v4 that surprise effect disappears to give way to the continuity effect. This model seems to maintain precisely what made the previous model famous: extraordinary power at a very low cost. Bad news for Anthropic. Such low prices are terrible news for Anthropic, which in recent weeks has been forced to execute a kind of “reduflation” of their new modelswhich are not more expensive but consume many more tokens. We’ll have to see if DeepSeek v4 Pro is as good as the company promises, but if it is, we’ll have another “DeepSeek moment” before us. Maybe not as notable as last year’s, but equally relevant. In Xataka | DeepSeek promised them happiness as the great Chinese AI. I didn’t count on a small detail: Kimi

35% of its chip manufacturing machines are already of Chinese origin

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Foreign lithography and wafer processing equipment manufacturers are selling less and less in China. In 2024, the country led by Xi Jinping represented 41% of ASML revenuebut in 2025 this figure dropped to 33%. And presumably in 2026 will contract up to 20%. Something very similar has happened to the American wafer processing machine manufacturer Applied Materials: its sales in China have gone from 37% of its total sales in 2024 to 30% in 2025. In addition, sales in China of the American companies Lam Research and KLA, and the Japanese Tokyo Electron, also have decreased during 2025 compared to those they obtained in 2024. This obvious trend is the consequence of two factors. On the one hand, US sanctions prevent US and allied manufacturers of lithography and wafer processing equipment from delivering their most sophisticated machines to their Chinese clients. The Dutch company ASML is most likely the most affected in this scenario. On the other hand, in response to pressure from the US, the Chinese Government is supporting the adoption of machines of Chinese origin in its integrated circuit factories. In fact, in 2025 the national tools represented 35% of the equipment in use in semiconductor plants, and Xi Jinping’s Government aims to reach 50% in new factories during 2026. Its purpose is clear: China’s chip industry needs to achieve technological independence as soon as possible in its fight with the United States. China has made great progress, but lithography remains its weakest point The resources that the Chinese Government is allocating to its designers and manufacturers of wafer processing equipment are bearing fruit. And they already compete face to face with foreign companies in the field of deposition, thermal processing, etching and cleaning of wafers. However, there are still no extreme ultraviolet (EUV) photolithography machines of Chinese origin in Chinese IC factories. Presumably they will arrive before this decade endsbut this is for the moment China’s real Achilles heel. One of the Chinese companies worth keeping track of is Pulin Technology. This organization has opted, like Naura Technology, AMEC (Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc. China) or Piotech Inc., to develop your own cutting-edge photolithography machines. And the achievements are coming little by little. In mid-2025 Pulin sent one of his clients your first cutting-edge equipment using nanoimprint lithography technology (known as NIL for its English name NanoImprint Lithography). In mid-2025, Pulin sent one of its clients its first cutting-edge equipment NIL technology is not new. The Japanese company Canon has its own commercial NIL solution for yearsand presumably its operating principles are essentially the same as those of the machine designed by Pulin. On paper, NIL photolithography equipment is an alternative to printing machines. extreme ultraviolet lithography (UVE) designed and manufactured by the Dutch company ASML, although no to the high aperture version of these teams. The latter are currently the most sophisticated and expensive that exist. Very broadly speaking, the production of silicon wafers in the latter requires very precisely transporting the geometric pattern described by the mask to the surface of the silicon wafer using ultraviolet light and extremely refined optical elements. NIL lithography, however, allows the pattern to be transferred to the wafer without the need for intervention in the process. an extremely complex optical system. This strategy is simpler and cheaper, but it also involves the execution of several sequential processes that make it slower than UVE and UVP lithography. Canon assures that its nanoimprint lithography equipment can be used to manufacture integrated circuits comparable to the 5nm chips that TSMC, Samsung or Intel produce with ASML’s UVE machines. And in the future, with the refinements that will arrive, they will be able to manufacture 2nm chips. In addition, a NIL equipment costs ten times less than an ASML EUV machine: 15 million dollars compared to the 150 million dollars that the Dutch company asks its clients for an EUV machine with numerical aperture 0.33. We still don’t know how much each Pulin NIL machine costs, but it is reasonable to predict that at most it will have a cost comparable to that of the Canon machine. Image | Naura Technology More information | Tom’s Hardware In Xataka | Japan wants to end the Netherlands’ leadership in lithography equipment. This is your plan to get it

Meta spent 2 billion on a Chinese AI startup. China is clear that it was a conspiracy

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With China and the United States dancing the dance of artificial intelligenceboth countries and companies want to get the best cards for their decks. Meta is investing millions in the development of AI and, even so, it seems to be lagging behind. To turn the tables, he closed 2025 with a $2 billion purchase: that of a Chinese startup called Manus. The operation was so notorious that the Chinese government itself raised an eyebrow and undertook an investigation to see what was happening there. And they are already clear. It was a conspiracy. The Manus case. Although it has rained a lot and these last few months in China AI companies have come out from under the stones, during the first half of 2025 the proper name was that of deepseek. It was the great competition from the Western OpenAI or Google Gemini, but in March something that looked like an AI agent began to appear: Manus. That’s how they sold italthough it was really a deep investigation mode that helps you perform actions, but does not do them for you. It didn’t matter: the expectation was there and, although there were doubts about his behavior and limits, Manus began to move a lot of money (more than 100 million in estimated income) and attract attention from the big players. One of them was Meta, who took over the company. The purchase. A good question is how China let something like this slip away for a technological and strategic rival to buy. And it’s a good question, but the answer is that, at some point, Manus stopped being a Chinese startup. In the middle of last year, Manus moved to Singapore, allowing the company to bypass export and import controls imposed on China. To the not having your own LLMthey depended on others like Claude which they could more easily access from outside China. This already set off alarm bells in the Government, but with the purchase of Meta the bells echoed. China put to work to various organizations to see what was really happening, the largest of them being the Chinese National Security Commission, which is commanded by President Xi Jinping himself. The reports prepared by this body are directly supervised by the leaders of the Communist Party, so it is a voice that must be taken into account. Conspiracy. And the result of the investigation is clear. As they comment in Financial Timesthe conclusion is that Meta’s acquisition of Manus is a conspiratorial attempt to try to undermine China’s technological capabilities. These are big words that do not remain in a vacuum, since the founders of Manus – Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao – were summoned by the NDRC last March to address issues such as possible violations of foreign investment rules in China. He did not stay for a meeting and, as the FT points out, both have been prohibited from leaving the country during the review process. In fact, there are sources that suggest that Manus would be considering backing out of the agreement, but even so, it is not clear that the Chinese authorities will be satisfied. For his part, Meta points out that they did everything according to the law and it seems that he has already started to integrate Manus systems into their tools, so taking that step back would be very complex. And now… what. That the National Security Commission has classified the case as “conspiracy” is something serious, since it was the trigger for a broader review that involves more agencies in the country that are currently reviewing everything. And the underlying problem is the speed with which everything happened. Manus took off and, just four months later, they moved everything to Singapore to break away from China just before the purchase of an American company. The investigation is shaking the Chinese technology sector because it is not the first time something like this has happened. Although on a smaller scale, it is an operation called ‘Singapore washing’ in which startups founded by Chinese move to the city-state to bypass China’s control and have a more direct line with the United States. The problem is that, at a time when the commercial and strategic war has intensified, calling the Manus case a “conspiracy” sets a precedent. One in which it is stated that China does not want to let artificial intelligence talent and technology escape because this advance has become one of the country’s strategic legs for the next five years. We will see what happens when the case is resolved, but it is clear that Beijing’s objective, like Washington’s, is to prevent its assets from escaping, and Manus can be the example for national technology companies do not follow a similar model in the future. In Xataka | We don’t know if “crisis” means “opportunity” in China, but there is one business where it does: RAM memory

Now a Chinese giant wants to turn it into the storage capital

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Navarra is a consolidated world leader in renewable energy, especially a leader in wind energy: back in 1994, it built its first park and since then it has not only dressed some of its most iconic mountains with wind turbines, but has also created a powerful business ecosystem around them that has earned it the nickname of being the Silicon Valley of wind turbines. The starting point. This industrial and technological tradition has laid the necessary foundations to be a pioneer in the next step of the energy transition. After almost three years of contacts and visits, Navarra has closed the agreement to install a Hithium Energy Storage battery gigafactory. As summarized the president of the Foral Community: “We know that China has decided to go out and invest in Europe and these are opportunities that Navarra cannot miss.” The project. The Government of Navarra together with Hithium Energy Storage will form a joint venture through the public company SODENA for the construction of a plant that will manufacture lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) cells and assemble complete stationary storage system batteries (BESS batteries). The agreement signed in China contemplates an investment of 450 million euros, according to Qui Tangdirector of Strategy at Hithium, and the creation of around 700 jobs, with the possibility of a second phase that would add about 300 more, as collects News from Navarra. Still with some to be closed, the start of production has been set for 2027 and the location with the most votes for its installation is the old BSH plant in Esquíroz/Ezkirotz, just five kilometers south of the Navarrese capital. Why is it important. The great pending issue for the European energy transition involves stationary batteries: without the capacity to store electricity generated by the sun and wind, the electrical system cannot absorb more renewables without compromising the stability of the network. Europe has a lot of installed generation and little of its own storage industry and that gap is precisely what Hithium comes to solve. On the other hand, manufacturing within the EU allows it to avoid tariffs and other bureaucracy that Brussels applies to Chinese energy products. For Navarra the impact has several levels. Beyond the obvious economic investment and employment, it represents a logical evolution: from becoming a benchmark in clean energy generation to becoming the manufacturing hub for the storage systems that will allow it to be managed. But Hithium will also be the second battery factory in Navarra: Hyundai Mobis already has its own in Noainalthough oriented towards electric vehicles. With this arrival, Navarra consolidates an industrial ecosystem around energy storage at the level of few European regions. Context. The movement comes at a time of reconfiguration of European industrial sovereignty against third parties through the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA). That Hithium chooses Navarra makes it possible for its production to carry the “Made in EU” label, thus complying with the sustainability and regulatory standards of the old continent. Navarra already had installed power and leading engineering companies, but it lacked the capacity to store energy. In the midst of the global energy crisis, demand for large-scale storage solutions has skyrocketed and Hithium was looking for a strategic port to supply the European market. The Foral Community has forged this agreement slowly, as the counselor explains of Industry, Ecological and Business Digital Transition of the Government of Navarra Mikel Irujo, after three years of negotiations and seven visits. In fact, Navarra has carried out a strategic project that was initially aimed at Euskadi, as ElDiario.es points out. Who is Hithium?. It may not be as well-known as CATL, BYD or Huawei, but Hithium Energy Storage Technology is a giant in its segment and is also a real teenager. Founded in 2019 in Xiamen (Fujian Province) by Wu Zuyu, engineer specialized in batteries and ex-CATLthe world’s largest manufacturer in the sector. Of course, unlike CATL, whose main business is batteries for electric vehicles, Hithium focuses exclusively in stationary storage for the electrical grid. Less media coverage than electric cars but essential for the energy transition. In record time she has gone from being unknown to becoming one of the leading manufacturers global stationary storage battery companies with a presence in more than 20 countries and more than 1,200 engineering professionals in a workforce of 8,000 people. The one in Navarra will be Hithium’s second factory outside of China (the other is in Dallas, Texas) and will be the company’s reference base for all of Europe. Yes, but. Although the agreement has been signed, Chivite itself has warned that there are still administrative steps pending and the location is still unclear. On the other hand, the joint venture with the participation of SODENA implies that the risk does not fall solely on Hithium: if the project is delayed or does not reach the objectives, the Navarrese citizens assume part of the consequences. The commitment to local employment is explicit and the Provincial government has promised to monitor itbut there are already precedents that invite caution. Leaving aside this specific case, there is a technological question that remains unanswered: Europe has foreign dependence on rare earths or semiconductors and this risk also affects batteries. It is true that a Chinese gigafactory on European soil generates local employment and produces within the EU, but the technology, intellectual property and strategic decisions continue to be made in China. In Xataka | The solar miracle that went wrong: Spain produces more electricity than it can manage In Xataka | We have a problem with heat in buildings. A Navarrese investigation knows how to cool them without air conditioning Cover | Hornsdale Power Reserve and Pamplona City Council

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