China AI chip supply and model performance draw fresh attention
U.S. prosecutors allege a $300 million NVIDIA server smuggling scheme linked to China as Chinese firms advance chip packaging, processor designs and foundation-model performance.
• U.S. prosecutors accuse Greg Lui of using falsified documents to smuggle more than $300 million worth of servers containing export-controlled NVIDIA chips to China.
• Bloomberg Intelligence said DeepSeek V4.1 Flash has narrowed the benchmark gap between leading Chinese and U.S. models to 3%, down from about 9% in May.
• Micrographs of Huawei’s Kirin 9050 Pro reportedly show two vertically stacked dies, while Qualcomm agreed to license patents related to Huawei’s LogicFolding chip technology.
• Nanya Technology plans to build a 3D wafer-packaging and testing facility in Taiwan using TSV and wafer-stacking technologies to address demand for high-performance, high-bandwidth memory driven by AI.
• Altman-backed Volantis unveiled a plan to integrate photonics into AI accelerators to connect memory and compute, while JEDEC published the first industrywide silicon-photonics reliability standard.
• Alibaba opened reservations for Qwen AI clip-on earbuds, which support translation in 89 languages, though pricing was not announced.