Qualcomm has agreed to supply ByteDance with millions of custom AI chips, known as ASICs, to power AI agentAI agentAn AI system that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, such as browsing, writing code or making purchases, rather than answering a single prompt. Agents raise new questions about liability, security and oversight because they act rather than just advise. workloads in the TikTok parent's data centers, Pandaily reported. The arrangement converts a ByteDance in-house chip design into a production ready semiconductor and gives Qualcomm one of its first large-scale customers for AI accelerators. Bloomberg first disclosed the deal on May 26, sending Qualcomm shares up more than 5%. U.S. export controls so far have focused on Nvidia and AMD GPU shipments, not custom ASIC flows.
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Ant Group's Alipay said its AI Pay service has processed more than 300 million transactions to date, Pandaily reported. At the Alipay AI Payment Ecosystem Conference in Hangzhou on May 26, the company unveiled an AI Wallet that lets users authorize and audit purchases executed by AI agentsAI agentAn AI system that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, such as browsing, writing code or making purchases, rather than answering a single prompt. Agents raise new questions about liability, security and oversight because they act rather than just advise., plus a Token Pay platform for AI model subscriptions and usage billing. Chinese model developers MiniMax and Stepfun signed on as early Token Pay partners. The rollout puts agentic commerce inside one of the world's largest payments rails.
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Profits at China's industrial enterprises above designated size grew 24.7% year over year in April, the fastest pace since December 2023, the National Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday, Caixin reported. Electronics industry profits surged 107.7% in the first four months, contributing 43.8% of all industrial profit growth, while equipment manufacturing and consumer goods profits broadly declined outside electronics. The article attributed the acceleration to surging AI related demand and higher oil prices feeding chemicals and nonferrous metals.
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Jeffrey Ding's ChinAI newsletter on Tuesday published a critique of Anthropic's "2028: Two Scenarios for Global AI Leadership" paper, calling it "dogmatic" and identifying seven unfounded assumptions. Ding, a George Washington University political scientist, disputes the paper's claim that military AI capabilities will diffuse quickly and can deploy in weeks. He argues that general purpose technologies historically diffuse over decades and that China's cloud adoption sits at roughly half the U.S. rate. He also challenges the paper's binary framing of U.S. dominance versus authoritarian AI rule, noting that the AI stack is already interconnected through arrangements like Perplexity offering subscribers access to Moonshot's Kimi K2.5 model. Anthropic's "2028" paper is among the documents that endorse the AI Overwatch Act computeComputeThe processing power used to train and run AI models, usually measured in chips, GPU-hours or FLOPs. flow controls.
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