The attack, dubbed “Salt Typhoon,” constituted a large part of a global campaign against telecoms, and it penetrated systems at many U.S. carriers so thoroughly that officials will almost certainly never know the full scope of the capabilities China achieved to spy on Americans’ communications.

But now, as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan declared that September, “we must maintain as large of a lead as possible.” On October 7, 2022, the Biden administration announced a sweeping set of export controls designed to cut off China from the most advanced chips used for training powerful AI models,

The idea from Kaiwa Technology, based in Guangzhou, involves a humanoid designed with an artificial womb embedded in its abdomen, intended to carry a fetus through ten months of gestation and deliver a baby, according to Chinese media outlets.

Chinese advances in AI have come one after another this year, starting with the widely heralded DeepSeek and its R1 reasoning model in January. This was followed by Alibaba’s Qwen and a flurry of others since July, with names such as Moonshot, Z.ai and MiniMax.

Nvidia struck a surprising deal after convincing the president that H20 chips aren’t a national security risk. But whether the reversal is good or bad depends on who you ask.

Trump said on Monday that he might allow Nvidia to sell a more advanced artificial intelligence chip in China based on the chipmaker’s latest and most advanced Blackwell platform. The performance of H20 chips sold to China is restricted compared with those more advanced processors sold to customers in the US.

AI technologies have “broken through the critical threshold of usefulness”, says one early-stage investor who frequents Liangzhu. He predicts a surge in how AI can be applied. “Once the water boils,” he says,

But that’s not the full story. While engineering degrees are critical, they don’t guarantee technological leadership. What really drives innovation is not how many people you train, but how you train them. And here, China faces a deeper, cultural problem that raw output can’t solve.

Trump said Monday that he has cut a deal with chipmaker Nvidia, allowing it to sell certain artificial intelligence chips to China in exchange for a cut of the revenue, which would go to the U.S. government. Trump said he also negotiated a similar deal with chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Upper chamber lawmakers want answers from the Trump administration on the 15% fee Trump said NVIDIA and AMD must pay to be able to sell their more advanced products to a major U.S. adversary.