The company is willing to run to hit a 2030 production date while AI chip demand continues to outstrip supply. Samsung Electronics is asking its equipment suppliers for a SEMI certification, which is a standard industry safety check that equipment must pass before it can be shipped to another country. Suppliers typically start the certification process only after a factory’s specifications are finalized, but Samsung has told several of its tool suppliers to obtain this certification ahead of the launch of the planned second chip plant in Taylor, Texas, to save time for faster installation later.

Samsung wants to hit a 2030 production date

Concrete plans for the factory are expected to become clearer by the end of the year, with production expected by 2030. The first Taylor factory already has Tesla as a major customer. Tesla signed a foundry contract worth about 22.76 trillion Korean won ($14.09 billion) with Samsung last year. The contract revived the Taylor timeline, which had been delayed several times due to weak demand and a lack of customers.

The first factory is set to open this year and will start trial production as early as next month, focusing on 2-nanometer production. The second factory is yet to have a customer of its own. According to industry sources, the second factory’s timeline depends on whether Tesla expands its orders or a new large customer signs up. Samsung’s construction unit, Samsung E&A, is reportedly preparing to send dozens of staff to the Taylor site to support the work.

In an interview, the mayor of Taylor, Jim Buzan, said that Samsung “put in the piers and foundation” for the second plant while it was still building the first. The mayor said Samsung “preplanned it several years back,” and shared that he expects this head start to let Samsung move faster on the second factory than it did on the first. Samsung’s reported figures put its initial minimum Taylor investment at $17 billion, its biggest ever in the United States.

The company has owned the land for its Taylor chip site since 2021, and has it zoned for as many as 10 factories. Around 100 Samsung employees have already moved to Taylor, and the total number of newcomers is likely to reach several hundred once partner company staff arrive. Mayor Buzan said Samsung has not received any of the $4.745 billion in CHIPS and Science Act money awarded to it in 2024.

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Non-GAAP net income after removal of share-based pay, investment swings and one-off items still dropped 38% to 20.72 billion yuan ($3.05 billion), while adjusted EBITA fell 30% to 27.33 billion yuan ($4.03 billion). Alibaba’s capital expenditures for Q2 hit 67.68 billion yuan ($9.98 billion), a 75% jump from the same period a year earlier, money the company tied to AI infrastructure. The expenditure drained cash, as free cash flow swung to an outflow of 44.67 billion yuan ($6.58 billion), more than double the 18.82 billion yuan outflow a year earlier.

Alibaba records 75% rise in capital spending

The unit housing Alibaba’s model work, its Qwen consumer app and the QwenWork enterprise agent, its AI Labs and Applications segment, ran an adjusted EBITA loss of 13.86 billion yuan ($2.04 billion). This loss was only 3.22 billion yuan one year ago. Alibaba blamed the higher numbers on higher inference costs from the Qwen app and deeper investment in its AI stack. The AI Cloud and Compute Services segment lifted revenue by 45% to 48.44 billion yuan ($7.14 billion).

Alibaba credited this to an increased adoption of its AI products. Revenue from AI-related products specifically came in at 12.38 billion yuan ($1.82 billion), a 12th straight quarter of triple-digit growth over one year. Unlike the AI applications unit, cloud brought in significant revenue. Its adjusted EBITA rose 133% to 5.63 billion yuan ($830 million). “We delivered a strong quarter, driven by the improving commercialization of our full-stack AI capabilities,” Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu said in a statement.

Alibaba’s retail engine split in two different directions, with the China Quick Commerce revenue climbing 45% to 53.30 billion yuan, while the larger China E-commerce business slipped 8% to 110.90 billion yuan. Its 88VIP membership tier grew by double digits to about 64 million members as of June 30.

Three months earlier, Alibaba posted adjusted net income of just 86 million yuan and its first operating loss since 2021, all caused by the same AI and quick-commerce bills. The company has told investors it aims to reach $100 billion in combined annual revenue from cloud and AI within five years. The scale of the spending in the just-completed quarter shows what this target will cost before it is achieved.

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OpenAI is rolling out a new version of its flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, which will automatically place users aged 13 to 17 in the teen version. Users under 13 are barred from ChatGPT entirely. Even if teens try to trick the system by signing up with a fake birthdate, the system will consider signals such as the topics an account discusses, the hours it is active, and how long it has existed, in order to decide if a user is under 18 or not. Users who are still wrongly sorted can get their age verified through Persona, a third-party firm that reviews a government ID or a live selfie and deletes the upload within seven days.

OpenAI VP details benefits of new model to teenagers

Ann O’Leary, OpenAI’s vice president of global policy, said the goal is to stop exposing teens to material “they shouldn’t be exposed to.” Parents who link an account to a teen user can lock access to the chatbot at chosen times. They also receive alerts in limited high-risk cases, although OpenAI says the controls do not let them read a teen’s messages. OpenAI also said the teen ChatGPT version brings together its existing safety features rather than create new ones.

For instance, the age prediction feature has existed since the start of the year, while OpenAI’s parental controls and study mode were launched roughly a year ago. The company first revealed its plans for a teen tier in September 2025. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also made an official inquiry into OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, xAI, Snap and Character.AI over how they protect minors around that period. The FTC specifically targeted “companion” chatbots following multiple tragic incidents, including the suicide of a 16-year-old who had interacted extensively with ChatGPT.

A 2025 study from Common Sense Media found more than 70% of U.S. teens have used AI chatbots for companionship, and half use AI companions regularly. A separate study found that ChatGPT would, when asked, tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, hide an eating disorder, or draft a suicide note. Sam Altman has called emotional overreliance on the technology “a really common thing” among young people.

The teen experience will be available for eligible accounts on either free or paid personal plans. From August 18, the teen version will be available for eligible accounts with no restrictions for free accounts. The company is also planning a full rollout in Australia, expected by September 8.

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The truce ends a dispute that broke out approximately six months ago. The controversy dates back to a clip created purely by AI of Tom Cruise trading blows with Brad Pitt, built with Seedance, and then spreading widely all over the internet. On February 20, MPA global general counsel Karyn Temple wrote to ByteDance general counsel John Rogovin, the Los Angeles Times reported, arguing that Seedance 2.0 had been trained on protected material and was turning out unauthorized clips of characters such as SpongeBob SquarePants alongside a recreated scene from “Stranger Things.”

ByteDance ends feud with MPA with copyright deal

Variety reported that the trade group accused ByteDance of “disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs” on a supposedly “massive scale.” Disney and other studios also objected to tools that could reproduce Marvel and Star Wars figures without permission, The News reported. The MOU then announced on Monday that it has created a structure covering ByteDance’s generative products, reaching users through TikTok, its separate U.S. TikTok app, CapCut, and Dreamina.

The MPA did not release the details of the specific barriers and deterrents in the deal to the public, the Los Angeles Times reported. Both companies have, however, pointed to newer releases as evidence that these safeguards have been initiated, with ByteDance claiming both Seedance 2.5 and Seedream 5.0 Pro, shipped last month, carry stronger IP protections. “Today’s agreement illustrates our belief that copyright is a cornerstone of the film and television industry,” MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin said in a statement.

He also added that the deal “reflects our shared determination to continue our work together to further fortify those guardrails.” ByteDance general counsel John Rogovin said the company “respects the intellectual property rights that underpin creative industries around the world” and said the MOU was “an important framework for continued collaboration as the technology evolves.” ByteDance is not the first AI company the MPA has pressured into concessions on its AI product.

The association had initially gone after OpenAI’s Sora before the firm added limits, according to Variety, with OpenAI eventually shutting Sora down earlier this year after a similar wave of unauthorized character videos. However, instead of fully retreating and shutting down its products, ByteDance is taking a different path, pouring more funds into Seedance, which is reportedly one of the most advanced video models available, alongside Google’s offerings.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Seedance has gained ground with independent filmmakers who find it cheaper than rival tools, a development that gives ByteDance a commercial reason to keep the studios afloat instead of completely disengaging from the market.

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Superman cleared a two-meter standing high jump on legs measuring 0.85 meters, and hit 12.66 m/s, which is equal to 45.6 km/h in speed. The human marks the robot beat for the respective actions are a 1.8-meter standing jump and a 12.4 m/s sprint. Usain Bolt reached a max speed of 12.42 m/s during his 2009 world-record race, meaning the ‘Superman” robot is faster than the world’s fastest man ever managed, if Unitree’s figures hold.

Unitree Robotics’ Superman robot hits record top speed

The robotics company has, however, not released any independent verification for these figures, with the numbers all coming from a company video and not an independently measured event. Unitree also stated that its engineers built the robot in a little over three months, and that the humanoid robot’s current hardware leaves plenty of room for improvement. The company’s founder, Wang Xingxing, hinted at the possibility back in March at the Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum.

He predicted that humanoid machines would break human sprint limits by mid-2026, referring to cheaper parts and better algorithms as the reason for such a possibility. The robotics company had introduced the As2W some weeks before, a wheeled quadruped robot built for cargo. The As2W weighs 25 kilograms, can carry a recorded max load of 180 kilograms, and can move a cargo of up to 16 kilograms continuously.

Unitree priced its coming IPO listing at 150.8 yuan and raised about 6.1 billion yuan, almost $905 million, in a deal that places the company’s valuation at about $9 billion. The IPO was oversubscribed by over 5000 times, and the company raked in 45% more than the 4.2 billion yuan it had initially targeted.

Real revenue also adds to the valuation, as sales hit 1.7 billion yuan last year, more than four times the 2024 figure, with net profit of 591 million yuan. Unitree sold over 5,500 humanoid units across all its G1, H1, and R1 units in 2025, with most of these going to research labs and entertainment buyers instead of factories and manufacturers.

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Apple has until now used email and a banner after signing into an Apple Account to alert users to threats. Now, an “Apple Threat Notification” appears on the Lock Screen and inside Settings. This feature works in addition to the older email and account-page alerts. The message informs the user that Apple “detected a mercenary spyware attack targeted at your iPhone. There are actions you can take now to help protect your data and device.” Apple changed the experience so users can reach guidance on what to do next more quickly.

Researcher says new Apple warnings are harder to miss

Researcher Pieter Arntz stated that a warning on the Lock Screen is much harder to miss than one buried in an inbox. He wrote, “The new on-device alert is meant to make a high-risk warning harder to overlook and complements notifications by email and through the user’s Apple Account page.” Apple refers to these notifications as “high-confidence alerts that a user has been individually targeted by a mercenary spyware attack, and should be taken very seriously.”

These are campaigns that cost millions of dollars, burn fast once they are discovered, and are aimed at a tiny group of people. Apple’s support documentation associates the attacks with state actors and the private companies that create surveillance tools for them, with Pegasus from Israel’s NSO Group as one example. The usual targets are journalists, activists, politicians, and diplomats. Apple only uses its internal threat intelligence and won’t say what generates a specific alert, as that would help attackers avoid detection.

The company says it has notified people in 150+ countries since the program began in 2021. Apple’s latest round of threat notifications, which was on Thursday, reached 110 countries. Apple’s advice to anyone who receives a notification is to enable Lockdown Mode, which removes features that attackers could exploit. The company says it hasn’t yet seen a case of a device running Lockdown Mode being successfully hacked.

It also directs recipients to the Digital Security Helpline run by the nonprofit Access Now, which is available 24/7. A genuine warning is valuable bait, so recipients should check if any alert is legitimate by signing in to account.apple.com, where Apple says a real threat notification shows up clearly at the top of the page. Apple says its real notifications never ask anyone to click on a link, install something, or give a password or verification code.

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It took Apple less than nine months to go from picking the Houston site to running a working plant. “In less than nine months, we have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into this Houston facility. “We stood up a factory, started production, and shipped the first advanced AI servers off the line,” said Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook. During Apple’s August 13 announcement, he said the production of the Mac mini will begin “later this year.”

Apple set to build first US-made Mac mini at the new site

The new site is called the Advanced Manufacturing Center. It occupies 20,000 square feet of the Houston plant. It provides free sessions to small and medium-sized businesses on the techniques Apple uses in its own lines, from machine-learning quality checks to sophisticated automation. Apple designed the curriculum to emphasize hands-on work.

On opening day, the first group of business leaders assembled and laser-etched a product themselves, working with a holographic table and factory-floor equipment. Sessions will cover printed circuit board design and final-assembly principles. Apple says it will open the center to local college students in the future. It is the company’s second such facility, following the Apple Manufacturing Academy that debuted in Detroit in August 2025 and has since trained close to 1,000 workers and entrepreneurs.

As Cryptopolitan reported at the time, Apple announced last September that it would spend $600 billion on US manufacturing over four years, which includes about 79 factories. That pledge also included a $2.5 billion expansion of Apple’s glass partnership with Corning in Kentucky and chip work with Taiwan Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, and Applied Materials. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Houston Mayor John Whitmire, Senator Ted Cruz, and other officials attended the Houston opening.

“This opening is an important step in Apple delivering on its promise to bring its manufacturing back to America,” Lutnick said. The company previously said firms that manufacture within the US are exempt from a 100% tariff on imported semiconductors. Apple has promised to start Mac mini production in Houston in 2026 but has not disclosed a shipping date, unit target, or price for a US-assembled model.

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It is left to Tesla to keep its promise and deliver the Roadster. As of this Cryptopolitan report, Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) traded at $350.34. It increased by 3% from Thursday’s close of $339.96. Now its shares are trading between $342.01 and $351.10; however, it is still way below its high of $498.83 and is closer to its low of $297.38 in 2026 for the year. Tesla currently has a market capitalization of $1.10 trillion.

Roadster rumor fuel Tesla stock surge

All of this began with a report by Grace Kay from The Information. In the report, she claims that Tesla is about to launch a redesigned next-gen Roadster. One of the big takeaways from the report was that the new reveal could be unveiled before August ends, and the redesign would include flying capabilities, which will be tested at Tesla’s site in McGregor, Texas.

Musk has previously teased the release of a flying car. Days before the report broke, Musk tweeted, “flying cars are coming.” Also, Tesla, for a couple of years, has teased a SpaceX cold gas thruster package that will let the car hover or briefly leave the ground. An old video clip of Musk teasing the Roadster went viral on X. The upcoming launch was tagged “unforgettable” by the poster. Musk simply replied, “Yes.”

Skeptics would be well within their rights not to be excited. And this is not without reason. The Roadster is still in the design development phase, and Tesla has floated a lot of release dates in the past years, without meeting any. In July 2025, Lars Moravy, VP of vehicle engineering at Tesla, stated the Roadster was “definitely in development,” but no car has come out to date. Tesla’s dwindling stock price cannot be ignored either. It has dropped by 26% as competition with BYD and Xiaomi stiffens.

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Microsoft has contacted Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to reserve capacity for the chips, which are due to be delivered in 2027. The order alone would exceed the tens of thousands of Maia 200 parts produced so far. Microsoft’s longer-term target is to exceed one million units, but packaging negotiations and supply of components may cap the actual number the company gets. The Maia 200 slipped after early tests failed to meet internal goals. Since then, it has reached only a handful of data centers.

Microsoft says the chip runs 30% better

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told investors on the company’s fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call on July 29 that the chip runs 30% better on performance per dollar than existing hardware and is being scaled to support OpenAI and Microsoft’s own MAI models. Back in January 2026, when Cryptopolitan reported the launch of the Maia 200, Microsoft described it as a second-generation part for inference based on TSMC’s 3-nanometer process.

Microsoft’s executive vice president for cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie, called it “the most efficient inference system that Microsoft has ever built.” Nadella has said openly that a goal is to cut reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft says its chips can run its own and OpenAI workloads at lower cost. It is expanding internal use through Azure AI Foundry and Copilot while selling the hardware to large outside cloud customers.

Earlier this month, Anthropic confirmed it is building its own semiconductor team to design custom chips for its Claude models. That makes it a potential buyer of the Maia 300 and a future rival in custom silicon chips. Last year, in-house chips from Google, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI were projected to make up 45% of the AI-chip market by 2028, compared with 37% in 2024.

Microsoft’s fiscal Q4 2026 revenues were $90.0 billion, up 18% year-over-year, with Azure and other cloud services up 43%. TSMC’s N3 node and CoWoS advanced packaging will face supply constraints through 2027. That’s around the same time Microsoft wants to ramp up Maia 300 chip production.

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In its recent coverage of SpaceX, Bloomberg referred to the company as one that overpromises and underdelivers, sparking the ire of both Eric Trump and Elon Musk. Eric Trump responded to the post via a quote with statistics that show that SpaceX was responsible for roughly 80 to 85% of all mass launched to orbit in 2025, compared to about 8 to 10% for China. He also said that the company completed “165 successful Falcon flights with zero failures.” Musk’s reply was shorter, simply writing, “Bloomberg is garbage,” to his followers. The post drew more than 1,600 likes within hours.

Eric Trump backs SpaceX’s activities with statistics

The “overpromising” charge that Eric Trump was trying to disprove relates to targets Musk has set but not yet met. Musk has a record of disputes over his public statements, including an announced plan to take Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) private that never happened. Cryptopolitan reported SpaceX’s first earnings. SpaceX reported $7.81 billion in second-quarter revenue, up 92% from a year earlier, but also a $541 million net loss and $18.37 billion in quarterly capital spending.

Company executives said the 13th Starship test still needs regulatory approval before it can happen. They also said a Starlink upgrade will not be fully available to customers until about 1,000 new satellites are in orbit. SpaceX’s Starship program has cost over $15 billion so far, including $3 billion in 2025 and nearly $900 million in early 2026. The company expects Starship to start delivering payloads to orbit in the second half of 2026, but that milestone remains ahead of it.

Eric Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity back in 2017 that critics of his father were “not even people.” He also called the news media “out of control.” That same year, he told a radio show that dwelling on negative coverage could push someone to “end up killing yourself out of depression.” During the 2024 campaign, he defended claims about FEMA that officials had labeled disinformation, telling Scripps News, “It’s not misinformation. FEMA has run out of money.”

Musk has had many similar clashes that have escalated as his platform has grown. The Guardian columnist Jane Martinson wrote about Musk’s interview with Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor-in-chief of The Economist, whom he called a “traitor to the West” after the interview ended. He also said the mainstream press is a “reality distortion nightmare mirror.”

A separate spat with President Donald Trump in June 2025 erased $34 billion from Musk’s net worth in a single day. During that dispute, Musk threatened to decommission SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft but ultimately reversed his decision five hours later.

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