Chinese AI firms MiniMax and Zhipu AI race to Hong Kong IPOs at $6.5B valuations despite massive losses. Zhipu burned $271M on $27M revenue in six months. The Manus-Meta deal reveals the emerging pattern: Chinese talent, Singapore HQ, American buyer.
OpenAI burns $17 billion annually while Anthropic eyes $300B valuation. Can AI companies bridge the gap between investor hype and actual profits? 2026 tests whether impressive technology becomes sustainable business—or just expensive demos.
Memory makers choose AI over PCs and phones, consuming 3x capacity for high-bandwidth chips. Result: prices up 50-100%, shortages through 2027, and a semiconductor market split between AI infrastructure and everyone else scrambling for scraps.
Chinese AI firms MiniMax and Zhipu AI race to Hong Kong IPOs at $6.5B valuations despite massive losses. Zhipu burned $271M on $27M revenue in six months. The Manus-Meta deal reveals the emerging pattern: Chinese talent, Singapore HQ, American buyer.
OpenAI burns $17 billion annually while Anthropic eyes $300B valuation. Can AI companies bridge the gap between investor hype and actual profits? 2026 tests whether impressive technology becomes sustainable business—or just expensive demos.
Memory makers choose AI over PCs and phones, consuming 3x capacity for high-bandwidth chips. Result: prices up 50-100%, shortages through 2027, and a semiconductor market split between AI infrastructure and everyone else scrambling for scraps.
Meta spent billions building free AI that nobody pays for. Then it bought Manus, a startup that convinced millions to subscribe in eight months. The acquisition reveals more about Meta's monetization struggle than its technology.
AI coding tools promise 55% productivity gains. A new study found developers actually work 19% slower with them—but feel faster. The gap between perception and reality explains why some users can't stop prompting, even at 2 AM.
Nvidia paid $20 billion for Groq's technology and hired its leadership. But it's not an acquisition, according to Jensen Huang. The licensing deal structure has become Silicon Valley's preferred method for absorbing competitors while avoiding regulatory scrutiny.
Marissa Mayer raised $8 million for her new AI startup. OpenAI raised $11 billion. That gap tells the real story—and so does the $20 million she burned at Sunshine, which managed just 1,000 downloads across multiple products over seven years.
Astra AI just won Slovenia's Startup of the Year. The numbers look great: 170,000 users, expansion into Germany, rave reviews. But their claimed 50 billion monthly tokens raises a question no one's asking: can a €24/month subscription cover those API bills?
Zhipu AI's GLM-4.7 benchmark chart excludes its strongest competitor. The data table tells a different story. But the real signal isn't the missing bar—it's a €30 annual subscription designed to snap into tools Western labs built.
Apple buried RDMA over Thunderbolt in a beta update. Now four Mac Studios can run trillion-parameter AI models at conversational speed. The cost: $50,000. Equivalent NVIDIA hardware: $780,000. No press release. No keynote. Just a checkbox in recovery mode.
Cursor just paid a premium for a code review startup to fix what it calls the new bottleneck in software development. But a July 2025 study using Cursor's own tools found AI made experienced developers 19% slower. The math gets uncomfortable from there.
China's EUV prototype isn't a technological defeat for the West. It's a counterintelligence one. The vector isn't smuggled crates. It's people. Europe discovered, again, that openness without defense is vulnerability, not virtue.
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