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Jul 16, 15:44
DeepSeek eyes US$70 billion valuation and Shanghai IPO as Apple Intelligence enters China

DeepSeek is preparing a new fundraising round and a possible Shanghai listing as surging computing costs force one of China's best-known artificial intelligence startups to rethink its long-standing resistance to outside capital.

Taiwan suppliers linked to the AI server market posted broad revenue growth in June, with rail-kit and server-chassis makers recording the fastest year-over-year gains as demand for rack-scale systems continued to lift mechanical components.

A European industry group, the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), has joined four other trade organizations in calling for the European Commission to impose interim measures while it processes an antitrust case against Broadcom. The case concerns recent licensing changes made by the chip designer on the virtualization platform VMware.

Apple has sued OpenAI for allegedly stealing trade secrets, but the real fight is over who controls the entry points of AI. As LLM technology converges, the case shows that competition is shifting back to a fundamental question: on what device, and in what way, will users use AI?

The 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) opens in Shanghai on July 17, with Chinese President Xi Jinping set to attend and deliver a keynote speech.

LG Electronics is expanding hiring for its robotic actuator business after reportedly starting AXIUM production months ahead of schedule, as the South Korean company builds the development, sales and quality-management capabilities needed to supply its own robots and outside humanoid manufacturers.

AI technologies and applications have matured rapidly in recent years. That has driven trends such as edge AI and physical AI. The shift has also affected industrial computer (IPC) makers, which have long focused on end-point applications on the factory floor and at other field sites.

Amazon Web Services opened its 2026 AWS Summit Taipei on July 15, placing AI agents, custom chips and enterprise AI adoption at the center of its annual cloud and AI conference.

Nvidia unveiled a series of new partnerships in Japan on July 16, 2026, highlighting the growing adoption of AI across manufacturing, robotics, automotive, healthcare and data center infrastructure. The announcements coincided with CEO Jensen Huang's visit to Japan, where the company showcased its latest physical AI technologies and deepened collaborations with several of the country's leading industrial groups.

OnePlus, an Android brand that once cultivated a devoted following among enthusiasts, is reportedly preparing to cease operations in the US and Europe as early as this week, a withdrawal that reads less like an isolated stumble than a symptom of a smartphone market where soaring component costs are pricing value-focused vendors out.

Apple is exploring acquisitions of semiconductor companies to accelerate development of AI server chips, reflecting mounting pressure to improve the computing infrastructure behind its AI ambitions, according to The Information.

Nvidia has laid out a sweeping expansion of its Japanese footprint. The company is moving beyond one-off supercomputer wins to embed its Blackwell-generation chips and software across the country's research labs, banks, hospitals, factories, and automakers. The breadth signals that Japan is being positioned as a full "AI ecosystem" for Nvidia, not a single-sector customer. It's a hedge that spreads the company's growth across sovereign science, industrial automation, and physical AI, even as questions mount over chip pricing and supply.