A Kirin 9000s chip fabricated in China by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), taken from a Huawei Technologies Co. Mate 60 Pro smartphone, photographed on Sept. 3, 2023. James Park/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The AI arms race, in the words of chef Emeril Lagasse, has officially kicked up a notch.

Not content with creating globally competitive AI models (to rival Anthropic and OpenAI) or even AI chips (to take on Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom), China has reportedly begun manufacturing the astonishingly expensive machines that make the chips (R.I.P. ASML).

A new report in The Information says that an unnamed state-backed company has achieved a breakthrough by making the kind of immersion deep ultraviolet lithography machines, or DUVs, used by chipmakers including TSMC. 

When I say this is heavy industry, believe it. A DUV lithography machine is about the size of a large truck, weighs upwards of 18 tons, and can cost up to $90 million. 

(DUV machines, by the way, aren’t to be confused with EUV machines—the “E” is for “extreme”—which are much more expensive, far more precise, and way heavier, weighing as much as two narrow-body airliners. Cool.)

It was only nine months ago that the editor of an American international relations magazine wrote on social media about a Chinese firm reverse-engineering an ASML chipmaking machine in an attempt to better learn how they worked and evade U.S. sanctions. (Going so far as to boldly call ASML for technical support, apparently, but I digress.) 

That post is now looking more serious by the week, given the precision engineering, parts, and assembly lines necessary to seriously pursue such a project.

No wonder shares of ASML fell 7% in the wake of the new report. For two decades, the Dutch company has controlled the lion’s share of the global DUV market, and now drives about 20% of its total revenue from China. —AN

While former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati makes headlines with the release of her Thinking Machines Lab’s first AI model, it’s been rather quiet elsewhere in the OpenAI diaspora—namely for former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence.

No more. On Monday the two-year-old startup announced that it had “entered into a strategic partnership with Nvidia that will allow us to scale our compute by 10x.”

The world’s leading AI chipmaker will make a “substantial” investment—reportedly $5 billion—in SSI, as it’s known. It will also supply the secretive startup with “large amounts” of Nvidia hardware that will presumably dwarf the cache of Google TPUs it had previously been using.

SSI was last valued at $32 billion and is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and Greenoaks Capital, among others.

And in case you were wondering, yes, Nvidia also struck a similar deal with Thinking Machines Lab in March. 

What SSI is up to is not known in great detail. In a statement, Sutskever said his company’s research is “focused on overlooked aspects of how the human brain functions.” The company itself has declared that safe superintelligence—a smarter-than-humans computer system that won’t imperil humanity—“is our mission, our name, and our entire product roadmap.” —AN

The number-one company on the Fortune 500 and Fortune Global 500 lists wants to put 5,105 satellites in space.

Amazon Leo (as in “low Earth orbit,” not “DiCaprio” or “Messi” or “XIV”) has filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission for a proposed satellite network that would provide direct-to-device voice and data connectivity.

The idea is to deliver cellular services—voice, messaging, data, emergency—directly to mobile devices that are beyond the reach of conventional (that is, terrestrial) cellular networks. 

Amazon would partner with mobile network operators all over the planet to facilitate it. It would also conveniently tap into the mobile satellite spectrum of Globalstar, which Amazon agreed to acquire in April for $11.6 billion.

If you’re thinking, boy, this sounds a lot like SpaceX’s Starlink—you’re right. 

Still, the Amazon initiative formerly known as Project Kuiper will need a lot more than 5,105 satellites to catch up to Elon Musk’s newly public company. 

With some 10,788 satellites in low Earth orbit, 12 million customers, and $11.4 billion in sales, Starlink has amassed a considerable lead in the category—nevermind its January FCC proposal to launch a low Earth orbit constellation of 1 million satellites. —AN

—Moonshot releases weights for its newest AI model, Kimi K3.

—Microsoft debuts Perception, an agentic security system to patch software flaws.

—27 years after Elon Musk co-founded the fintech firm X.com, his social media company of the same name rolls out a banking service called X Money.

—NBCUniversal and YouTube do a deal to make all Peacock content available via YouTube Premium in the U.S. next year.

—China will take “all necessary measures” if the U.S. sanctions Chinese companies for allegedly distilling their AI models.

—Minnesota is temporarily blocked from enforcing a new law banning prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket.

—Microsoft’s Xbox suffers a “major outage” that makes it difficult for players to sign in or see game libraries.