TechPulse USA

China's AI Compute Will Double on America's Own Chips By Daniel Rao | October 24, 2026 Here is the paradox at the heart of America's AI race with China, stated as plainly as a new report from the Institute for Progress (IFP) allows: the United States is winning the chip war and losing the plot at the same time. China's access to AI computing power is set to roughly double in a single year — from about 4.6 million to 8.8 million H100-equivalents by the end of 2027, IFP estimates — and about 65% of that doubled capacity will run on US-designed chips. Washington spent four years building a fence around its best silicon. China is about to double its compute anyway, largely by renting the fence's own hardware, from clouds, in countries the fence was never built to cover. Export controls are not failing. They are leaking, through the cloud, at industrial scale — and that leak is now the single most important fact in the AI race. We read the full IFP report, not just the S...

Hangzhou, China — DeepSeek is headquartered here, in the city whose start-ups now define the open-weight AI race. Photo: 方的1P via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Beijing spent last week scaring the open-source AI world. This week it turned around and handed two of its champions a licence to keep flooding that world. If that sounds like a contradiction, you are reading the wrong part of the story — the part Beijing wants you to read is the one where the scariest export-control regime in Chinese tech history turns out to be a velvet rope, not a wall. DeepSeek and MiniMax have completed the new registration procedures and are proceeding with open-source releases and overseas licensing of their AI models, according to Yuyuan Tantian, a social-media account affiliated with state broadcaster CCTV, which broke the news in a Thursday-evening post. In a follow-up post on Friday, the account said overseas internet users had urged other Chinese open-source large language models to follow su...

Three of China's biggest technology companies have quietly placed what looks like the largest single chip order in Nvidia's history — more than three million workstation GPUs with a sticker price above $35 billion. There is just one problem: Nvidia has told its own partners it cannot guarantee it can build them. That is the twist hiding inside Reuters' exclusive on Tuesday. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent are not buying the datacentre monsters Washington spent four years banning. They are buying desk-side workstation cards — and that is exactly why the order slipped through the net. Photo: Two Nvidia Quadro 6000 workstation cards — older models, but the same idea Beijing is buying at scale: professional GPUs that sit outside datacentre export bans. The three-million-card order is for the far newer RTX PRO 5500. Credit: Jfmarck / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The order nobody saw coming Update, Oct. 21: Since Reuters' exclusive, the specs picture has filled i...

China Drafts 40-Tech Export Lock on AI, Biotech and Solar By Daniel Rao, TechPulse USA Beijing has picked a Friday — the classic window for news it wants absorbed slowly — to put the three engines of its technology economy behind an export wall. On Friday, China's Ministry of Commerce proposed adding 40 technologies spanning artificial intelligence, biomedicine and photovoltaics to its catalogue of barred or restricted exports. The draft covers the crown jewels: AI models, the agents built on top of them, and the computing clusters that train them. China says this is routine housekeeping. It is not. It is the most aggressive move Beijing has made yet in the technology cold war, timed just weeks before Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet again at the APEC leaders' summit in Shenzhen. Solar panel fields spread across the Kubuqi Desert in Inner Mongolia, captured by the Landsat satellite. China makes roughly nine of every ten solar panels — and now wants the know-how behind them...

Washington spent four years trying to choke China's AI ambitions. Instead, it choked its own champion. New IDC data seen by Reuters shows Nvidia's share of China's data-centre AI chip market fell to 34% in the first half of 2026 — and Huawei, the company the controls were designed to contain, nearly closed the gap at 28%. Four years of export controls, billions in foregone revenue, and a trade war fought one licence at a time: this is the scoreboard. Photo: Jensen Huang, Nvidia's co-founder and CEO, photographed at Stanford University in April. Anders Eidesvik via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The numbers are worse than they look Start with the raw arithmetic, because it is brutal. Nvidia shipped 678,000 AI accelerators in China between January and June 2026, down 44% from a year earlier, according to the IDC report. That is not a soft quarter. That is more than half a million chips that didn't ship — in a market that, as a whole, kept growing around Nvi...

The first domino has fallen in the largest AI chip-smuggling case in American history — and he was the one the indictment called the "fixer." Ting-Wei "Willy" Sun, a contractor linked to Super Micro Computer, pleaded guilty on Thursday in Manhattan federal court to four counts: conspiracies to violate U.S. export controls, smuggle goods from the United States, defraud the country, and obstruct justice. The plea, entered before the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, ends the case against the man prosecutors described as the broker and "fixer" of a scheme to funnel roughly $2.5 billion worth of AI servers — packed with Nvidia's most advanced chips — to China. Two other men are still fighting. One of them co-founded Super Micro itself. The guilty plea landed with almost no ceremony — a filing that surfaced Friday, a one-line lawyer response ("declined to comment"), and SMCI shares barely twitching in extended trading. But don't mistake qu...

Tencent Leased 100,000 Chips It Can't Legally Buy Update, Oct. 2 The market has reacted: Oracle shares rose more than 2.5% in overnight trading after the FT report, per Finance.yahoo and Stocktwits coverage. Reuters still cannot independently verify the report and neither Tencent nor Oracle has commented (TheEdge, Oct. 2). ChosunBiz (Oct. 2) reports Tencent will more than double AI spending this year to fold its Hunyuan model and AI agents into games and social apps, including WeChat's 1.4 billion users. By Daniel Rao File photo: Nvidia's Santa Clara headquarters. The advanced AI chips at the heart of the reported Oracle–Tencent lease are Nvidia-class hardware that Tencent is barred from buying in China. Photo: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Tencent cannot legally buy the chips it needs. So it rented 100,000 of them instead — for a reported $7 billion. And if the Financial Times' sources are right, the whole manoeuvre is perfectly legal, which ma...