The first wave of electric-vehicle batteries is reaching the end of the road, and China and the West are taking very different paths on what to do with them. An electric car battery wears out after about a decade. It is too weak by then to drive far, but still holds plenty of charge for […]
After moving to Taiwan and taking up scuba diving, I recently started shopping for an underwater camera. What began as a simple search quickly turned into an exploration of the rapidly shifting geography of consumer technology. There was a time when the answer would have been obvious: buy a GoPro. The California company basically invented […]
As artificial intelligence reshapes the global economy, Chinese universities are rapidly redrawing the landscape of what is worth studying. In recent months, Chinese universities have actively cut foreign language and translation programs and launched new majors in “embodied intelligence” and “low-altitude economy.” A survey published in May tracked 70 Chinese universities that announced changes to […]
The current edition of the FIFA World Cup features a sensor-fitted ball, real-time tracking, artificial intelligence-assisted offside calls, and an AI assistant for each of the 48 teams. Behind these innovations are data workers in countries including India, Cambodia, and the Philippines, who are essential for the many AI tools in play. Football embraced data […]
On the morning of February 20, 2026, Juan Carlos Muñoz, then Chile’s minister of transportation and telecommunications, woke up to an email from the U.S. State Department. It informed him that his diplomatic visa had been canceled. The visas of Muñoz and two other Chilean government officials were revoked for activities that “compromised critical telecommunications […]
Stu Clott, an operations manager and part-time developer in San Diego, used to code with Claude. But he recently found a cheaper alternative: DeepSeek. While an hourlong coding session would cost about $10 on Claude, the same work cost less than 50 cents on DeepSeek, Clott said. Over the past few weeks, he has used […]
At the end of every year, Spotify Wrapped takes over social media feeds, with users showing off the annual recap of their top music choices. Lately, these reviews have taken on a more international flavor — packed with K-pop and Latino rhythms that mirror the platform’s explosive overseas expansion and increasingly diverse artist catalog. Launched […]
As the U.S. and China battle for artificial intelligence supremacy, a fundamental divide in engineering philosophy could determine the winner. While American pioneers like OpenAI and Anthropic favor a closed-source approach — keeping their proprietary model code locked behind a commercial interface — Chinese AI labs are aggressively releasing open-source models. This strategy allows developers […]
Poring over the SpaceX IPO prospectus, a recurring theme surfaces: the massive, quiet influence of Middle Eastern finance in the most ambitious IPO in history. Sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, their AI subsidiaries and the technology companies building data centers as part of these deals were all in the […]
Chinese upstart Spacesail is trying to steal SpaceX’s thunder. State-backed Spacesail launched two satellites on a reusable rocket on June 1, just days before SpaceX’s $1.8 trillion listing on June 12, the largest public offering to date. Much of SpaceX’s valuation rests on Starlink, the satellite internet service, which has over 10 million customers across […]