Dutch photolithography giant shaping chipmaking
Governor Kathy Hochul has signed an executive order pausing new permits for hyperscale data centres that use 50 megawatts or more for up to one year. The pause directs regulators to complete an environmental review, consider rules forcing developers to pay for power and grid upgrades, and examine tax breaks for the industry.
CXMT’s Shanghai IPO has surged in value, spurring bipartisan concern in Washington about Beijing’s possible state backing. The Pentagon has placed CXMT on its security list, while lawmakers push for a classified briefing to assess national-security risks tied to China’s military-civil fusion strategy.
Macau’s former lawmaker Au Kam San remains jailed under the city’s national security law. A year after his arrest, authorities have offered limited details, and concerns about due process and the broader signal toward dissent persist as prosecutions proceed behind closed doors.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has posted a record first-half profit of about $185 billion as markets rally in tech names. It has disclosed a 0.05% stake in SpaceX, valuing the position at just over $1.2 billion, while its larger holdings include Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft. NBIM says the fund remains globally diversified and long-term oriented.
Rhodium Group finds Chinese frontier AI labs generate only a fraction of OpenAI and Anthropic revenue, challenging assumptions about scale. Z.ai and Moonshot are expanding ARR, while official rounds push for greater in-house sovereignty and AI-powered efficiency.
ASML’s High NA EUV lithography machines, costing about $400 million each, are being adopted by Samsung, TSMC and Intel to print ever-smaller chip features for AI data centers and consumer devices. The move accelerates a global shift toward next-generation photolithography, with industry-wide capacity expansion on the horizon.
Samsung and SK Hynix shares fall more than 3% as DeepSeek says it has reduced high-bandwidth memory in its AI models, dimming investors’ optimism after July’s rebound and amid rate-hike fears.
President Donald Trump has dismissed calls from AI leaders to slow frontier development, attacked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Truth Social and called safety concerns a "hoax" and a "sick conspiracy." His posts have coincided with a sell-off in AI-linked stocks and intensified debate over regulation and US competition with China.
Chinese companies have closed much of the gap with U.S. firms in frontier AI models this year, producing competitive systems such as Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, DeepSeek’s R1/V4 and Z.ai’s GLM series. U.S. export controls have limited Chinese access to advanced chips, but Chinese research, investment and model engineering have nevertheless produced narrow and fragile parity with U.S. models.
Mistral AI has introduced ML4, its 1-trillion-parameter model nicknamed Le Chonk, aimed at cyberdefense, coding, and niche industrial tasks. It is in preview, with weights to be released soon. The launch comes amid a broader push for European tech sovereignty and a shift toward open-weight models that rival closed systems.
Global AI semiconductor stocks have surged on AI infrastructure demand, but fresh data show a pullback in memory-chip names as CXMT’s advances raise questions about yield, scale and margins. Investors are reassessing pricing power and the durability of AI-driven demand.
TSMC has posted record profits on strong AI demand and is exploring a Texas site for Terafab alongside its Arizona expansion, while signaling ongoing capacity constraints as global customers push for more advanced chips.