Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global said on Thursday that it is working with Chinese carmakers to develop its own robotaxis, which it aims to put into service by 2025, revealing a concept one with robotic arms it called "Didi Neuron." From a report: The company said that it is collaborating with multiple new energy carmakers in China on developing robotaxis. "We hope they can enter Didi's network and provide services by 2025," Didi Autonomous Driving COO Meng Xing said at a company event that was livestreamed online. "We hope they will be domestically produced. We hope the supply chain is controllable, and even 90% of the key components inside can be domestically produced," he said. He also showed off a robotaxi concept car called "Didi Neuron", with robotic arms that can help passengers pick up luggage.

China plans to require a security review of generative AI services before they're allowed to operate, casting uncertainty over ChatGPT-like bots unveiled by the country's largest tech companies including Baidu. From a report: Providers of services must ensure content is accurate and respects intellectual property, and neither discriminates nor endangers security, the Cyberspace Administration of China said in draft guidelines published for public feedback. AI operators must also clearly label AI-generated content, the country's internet overseer said in a statement posted on its website.

The CAC's requirements add to Beijing's growing attempts to regulate the explosive growth of generative AI since OpenAI's ChatGPT fired up the industry in November. Companies from Alibaba Group to SenseTime and Baidu all aim to build the definitive next-generation AI platform for the world's largest internet market. That mirrors a growing wave of development abroad with Alphabet's Google and Microsoft among the many tech companies exploring generative AI, which can create original content from poetry to art just with simple user prompts. China's made no secret of its wish to elevate AI at a time the country is locked in a conflict with the US over technology from chips to EVs. But it remains uncertain how the government intends to both galvanize and police the emergent field.

Tesla will open a factory in Shanghai to produce its Megapack large-scale batteries, cementing another foothold for the U.S. company in China even as political and economic tensions between Washington and Beijing swirl. The Washington Post reports: Tesla said in a brief tweet on Sunday that its "Megafactory" in Shanghai will be capable of producing 10,000 Megapacks annually, an output equivalent to its other Megafactory in Lathrop, Calif., about 70 miles east of San Francisco. The company, which disbanded its public relations department, did not provide further details. Elon Musk, Tesla's chief executive, said in a tweet that the factory in Shanghai would "supplement" the production in California.

The Chinese factory will be built in Lingang, a suburban area of Shanghai where Tesla's vehicle factory is also located, according to Chinese media. Lu Yu, an official in Lingang, told local media that production could start as soon as the second quarter of 2024. The investment in China by Tesla comes after the coronavirus pandemic brought some supply chains to a halt as factories in China shut down amid strict "zero covid" protocols. With those setbacks still fresh in many executives' minds -- and amid concerns over alleged human rights violations and chilly relations between Washington and Beijing -- China has struggled to attract foreign investment since the pandemic.

The Megapacks differ from most of Tesla's consumer-focused offerings, like the electric vehicles it is widely known for, in that they are more a piece of energy infrastructure than a consumer product. The batteries are intended to store energy from renewable sources such as wind and solar, allowing energy to be drawn even when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Batteries like the Megapack are not yet widely implemented in the United States and purchases of the technology have mostly been kept under wraps. But the Megapack has been bought for Apple's renewable energy storage project in California, according to the Verge, and for a storage project outside Houston, Bloomberg first reported. A Megapack, Tesla says, "stores energy for the grid reliably and safely, eliminating the need for gas peaker plants and helping to avoid outages." Each pack can store enough energy to power 3,600 homes for an hour, Tesla says.

China's payment and clearing industry association warned on Monday against using Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence tools due to "risks such as cross-border data leaks." From a report: "Payment industry staff must comply with laws and rules when using tools such as ChatGPT, and should not upload confidential information related to the country and the finance industry," the Payment & Clearing Association of China said in a statement on Monday. The association is governed by the China's central bank. OpenAI has kept its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot off-limits to users in China, but the app is attracting huge interest in there, with firms rushing to integrate the technology into their products and launch rival solutions. While residents in China are unable to create OpenAI accounts, virtual private networks and foreign phone numbers are helping some bypass those restrictions to access the chatbox.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from NBC News: The Chinese spy balloon that flew across the U.S. was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration's efforts to block it from doing so, according to two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official. China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure-eight formations) and transmit the information it collected back to Beijing in real time, the three officials said.

The intelligence China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel, rather than images, the officials said. The three officials said China could have gathered much more intelligence from sensitive sites if not for the administration's efforts to move around potential targets and obscure the balloon's ability to pick up their electronic signals by stopping them from broadcasting or emitting signals.
America's Department of Defense "directed NBC News to comments senior officials made in February that the balloon had 'limited additive value' for intelligence collection by the Chinese government 'over and above what [China] is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low earth orbit.'"

America's Department of Justice just launched an investigation into the leaking of classified documents from the U.S. Department of Defense, reports the Washington Post.

"On Wednesday, images showing some of the documents began circulating on the anonymous online message board 4chan and made their way to at least two mainstream social media platforms, Telegram and Twitter." Earlier Friday, The Washington Post obtained dozens of what appeared to be photographs showing classified documents, dating to late February and early March, that range from worldwide intelligence briefings to tactical-level battlefield updates and assessments of Ukraine's defense capabilities. They outline information about the Ukrainian and Russian militaries, and include highly sensitive U.S. analyses about China and other nations. The materials also reference highly classified sources and methods that the United States uses to collect such information, alarming U.S. national security officials who have seen them.... The material that appeared online includes photographs of documents labeled "Secret" or "Top Secret," and began appearing on Discord, a chat platform popular with gamers, according to a Post review.

In some cases, it appears that the slides were manipulated. For instance, one image features combat casualty data suggesting the number of Russian soldiers killed in the war is far below what the Pentagon publicly has assessed. Another version of the image showed higher Russian casualty figures. Besides the information on casualties that appeared to be manipulated to benefit the Russian government, U.S. officials who spoke to The Post said many of the leaked documents did not appear to be forged and looked consistent in format with CIA World Intelligence Review reports distributed at high levels within the White House, Pentagon and the State Department....

The documents appear to have been drawn from multiple reports and agencies, and concern matters other than Ukraine. Two pages, for example, are purportedly a "CIA Operations Center Intelligence Update," and includes information about events concerning Russia, Hungary and Iran.... Rachel E. VanLandingham, a former Air Force attorney and expert on military law, said that whoever is responsible for the leak "is in a world of hurt." Such breaches, she said, constitute "one of the most serious crimes that exist regarding U.S. national security...."

Skepticism abounded Friday among both Russian and Ukrainian officials aware of reports about the leaks, with each side accusing the other of being involved in a deliberate act of disinformation.
The Post notes one defense official told them "hundreds — if not thousands" of people had access to the documents, so their source "could be anyone."

But the photographs received by the Post were apparently taken from printed documents, and "classified documents may only be printed from computers in a secure facility, and each transaction is electronically logged, said Glenn Gerstell, a former general counsel with the National Security Agency who emphasized that he was speaking only about general procedures. "The fact that the documents were printed out should significantly narrow the universe of the initial inquiry."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The Russian government has banned more than 10,000 websites for content about the war in Ukraine since Moscow launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022. The blacklist includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and independent news outlets. Over the past year, Russians living inside the country have turned to censorship circumvention tools such as VPNs to pierce through the information blockade. But as dozens of virtual private networks get blocked, leaving users scrambling to maintain their access to free information, local activists and developers are coming up with new solutions. One of them is Amnezia VPN, a free, open source VPN client.

"We even do not advertise and promote it, and new users are still coming by the hundreds every day," says Mazay Banzaev, Amnezia VPN's founder. Unlike commercial VPNs that route users through company servers, which can be blocked, Amnezia VPN makes it simple for users to buy and set up their own servers. This allows them to choose their own IP address and use protocols that are harder to block. "More than half of the commercial VPNs in Russia have been blocked because it's easy enough to block them: They do not block them by protocols, but by IP addresses," says Banzaev. "[Amnezia] is an order of magnitude more resilient than a typical commercial VPN." Amnezia VPN is similar to Outline, a free and open source tool developed by Jigsaw, a subsidiary of Google. Amnezia was created in 2020 during a hackathon supported by Russian digital rights organization Roskomsvoboda. Even then, "it was clear that things were moving toward stricter censorship," says Banzaev. [...]

It is unclear how many users the service has, since the organization doesn't have a way to monitor user numbers, Banzaev says. However, Amnezia offers a Telegram bot called AmneziaFree, which shares VPN configurations that help users access blocked platforms and news; it has almost 100,000 users. The bot is currently struggling with overload, and users are complaining about spotty service. Banzaev says the Amnezia team is working to add new servers on a limited budget, and that they are also working on a new version of the service. "Amnezia is not only used in Russia," notes Wired. "The service has spread to Turkmenistan, Iran, China, and other countries where users have been struggling with free access to the web."

Putting a temporary pause on artificial intelligence development would only hand an advantage to competitors in China, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, after more than 1,000 researchers signed a letter warning of the consequences of moving too quickly on AI research. From a report: Speaking to the Australian Financial Review in an interview published Friday, Schmidt said there were legitimate concerns about the speed of research into AI but they should be mitigated by tech companies working together to set standards. In the past week, more than 1,000 researchers and executives, including Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, signed an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute, which called for an AI research pause of "at least six months," warning of "potentially catastrophic effects" on society if appropriate governance wasn't put in place. But Schmidt said he wasn't in favor of the six-month pause as it would "simply benefit China. What I am in favor of is getting everyone together ASAP to discuss what are the appropriate guardrails."

China has invited Venezuela to join its lunar research station project as the country works to gain partners for the endeavor. SpaceNews reports: Venezuela would be the first country to join China and Russia in the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), which is planned to be constructed in the early 2030s using super heavy-lift launch vehicles. The launches will follow smaller, precursor missions later this decade. Marglad Bencomo, executive director of the Bolivarian Agency for Space Activities (ABAE), visited China's new, national Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) March 30 to discuss cooperation and exchanges. She was met by Wu Yanhua, former deputy director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and now executive vice chairman of DSEL. The two sides exchanged in-depth views on international cooperation in the field of deep space exploration, according to a DSEL statement.

Bencomo said that Venezuela was willing to sign a China-Venezuela Memorandum of Understanding as soon as possible to jointly promote the construction of international lunar research stations, according to the DSEL statement. ABAE has been invited to attend an international forum hosted by DSEL during China's national "space day," held annually on April 24 since 2016, potentially providing a platform for signing an MOU. China and Russia presented a roadmap for the joint ILRS in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2021 and opened the project to interested parties.

China is considering banning the export of technologies used to produce high-performance rare earth magnets deployed in electric vehicles, wind turbine motors and other products, citing "national security" as a reason, it has been learned. From a report: With the global trend toward decarbonization driving a shift toward the use of electric motors, China is believed to be seeking to seize control of the magnet supply chain and establish dominance in the burgeoning environment sector.

Beijing is currently in the process of revising its Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export -- a list of manufacturing and other industrial technologies subject to export controls -- and released a draft of the revised catalog for public comment in December. In the draft, manufacturing technologies for high-performance magnets using such rare earth elements as neodymium and samarium cobalt were added to the export ban. The solicitation of comments ceased late January and the revisions are expected to be adopted as early as this year.

Chinese state-owned telecom firms are developing a $500 million undersea fiber-optic internet cable network that would link Asia, the Middle East and Europe to rival a similar U.S.-backed project, four people involved in the deal told Reuters. From the report: The plan is a sign that an intensifying tech war between Beijing and Washington risks tearing the fabric of the internet. China's three main carriers -- China Telecommunications Corporation (China Telecom), China Mobile Limited and China United Network Communications Group (China Unicom) -- are mapping out one of the world's most advanced and far-reaching subsea cable networks, according to the four people, who have direct knowledge of the plan.

Known as EMA (Europe-Middle East-Asia), the proposed cable would link Hong Kong to China's island province of Hainan, before snaking its way to Singapore, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and France, the four people said. They asked not to be named because they were not allowed to discuss potential trade secrets. The cable, which would cost approximately $500 million to complete, would be manufactured and laid by China's HMN Technologies, a fast-growing cable firm whose predecessor company was majority-owned by Chinese telecom giant Huawei, the people said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Like so much in our modern era, Australia's high-stakes gamble on renewable energy starts with an Elon Musk Twitter brag. South Australia's last coal-fired power plant had closed, leaving the province of 1.8 million heavily reliant on wind farms and power imports from a neighboring region. When an unprecedented blackout caused much of the country to question the state's dependence on clean power, Tesla boasted -- on Twitter, of course -- that it had a solution: It could build the world's biggest battery, and fast. "@Elonmusk, how serious are you about this," replied Australian software billionaire and climate activist Mike Cannon-Brookes. "Can you guarantee 100MW in 100 days?" Musk responded: "Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?"

To the astonishment of many, Tesla succeeded, and today, almost seven years later, that battery and more like it have become central to a shockingly rapid energy transition. By the middle of the next decade, major coal-fired power stations that generate about half of Australia's electricity will shut down. Gas-fired plants are being retired, too, and nuclear power is banned. That leaves solar, wind and hydro as the major options in the country's post-coal future. "It's really a remarkable story," said Audrey Zibelman, the former head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, or AEMO, the agency that runs the grid, and now an adviser to Alphabet's X. "Because we're not interconnected, we've had to learn to do it in a much more sophisticated way, where a lot of other countries will go once they've shut down their fossils."

It may be Australia's biggest power buildout since electrification in the 1920s and 30s. And, if successful, could be replicated across the 80% of the world's population that lives in the so-called sun belt -- which includes Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India, southern China and Southeast Asia, says Professor Andrew Blakers, an expert in renewable energy and solar technology at Australian National University. That, in turn, would go a long way to halting climate change. Building battery storage is just one critical piece of the national project, and AEMO and others are worried coal plants will shut before there's enough additional electricity supply. Australia needs to increase its grid-scale wind and solar capacity ninefold by 2050. Connecting all that generation and storage into the grid will require more investment. Overall, the cost could be a staggering A$320 billion ($215 billion), and the money is starting to flow: Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., Macquarie Group Ltd., and billionaires Andrew Forrest and Cannon-Brookes have all been involved in headline-grabbing energy deals in recent months. New government support for renewables has also improved investor sentiment, according to the Clean Energy Investor Group, which includes project developers and financiers.

A boom in artificial intelligence startup funding sparked by OpenAI has spilled over to China, the world's second-biggest venture capital market. Now American institutional investors are indirectly financing a rash of Chinese AI startups aspiring to be China's answer to OpenAI. From a report: The American investors, including U.S. endowments, back key Chinese VC firms such as Sequoia Capital China, Matrix Partners China, Qiming Venture Partners and Hillhouse Capital Management that are striking local AI startup deals, which haven't been previously reported. U.S. government officials have grown increasingly wary of such investments in Chinese AI as well as semiconductors because they could aid a geopolitical rival. For instance, Sequoia China, the Chinese affiliate of the Silicon Valley VC stalwart, recently made a U.S.-dollar investment in a brand-new AI venture created by Yang Zhilin, a young assistant professor at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University, which is sometimes described as China's equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to a person with direct knowledge of the deal. Yang, who got his doctorate from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, in 2019, is considered one of China's top AI researchers. He previously co-founded another startup Sequoia China backed, Recurrent AI, which develops tools for salespeople, according to the company's website. Matrix and Qiming, meanwhile, recently funded another Beijing-based AI startup, Frontis, which has compared its product to ChatGPT. It was founded in 2021 by Zhou Bowen, a Tsinghua professor who once led JD.com's AI research lab, according to the company's website. The deal gave the startup a paper valuation of hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars, the company said.

Hong Kong's attempt to attract cryptocurrency companies is getting help from an intensifying crackdown by American regulators. From a report: The city was once home to a number of prominent companies, including Crypto.com, BitMEX and now-bankrupt FTX. But increasing competition from Singapore, concerns about China's tough approach to crypto and Hong Kong's prolonged and strict response to Covid-19 meant many companies in the sector left. Hong Kong is now determined to bring some of that action back, in contrast with the U.S. In the past few weeks alone, U.S. regulators have cut off access to crypto products and services, targeted crypto friendly banks, brought civil charges against celebrities said to have touted digital assets and sued exchanges including Binance, the operator of the world's largest crypto exchange. Prosecutors have also accused FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was based in Hong Kong at one point, of conspiring to bribe Chinese government officials in their latest indictment.

"The U.S. being more stringent these days than ever on crypto and Hong Kong regulating in a more favorable way...is going to clearly shift the center of gravity of crypto assets trading and investments more towards Hong Kong," said Ambre Soubiran, chief executive of Kaiko, a digital assets data provider based in Paris. "We want to be where our clients are," she said. Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission proposed a new licensing framework in February, focusing on investor protection. A senior official said at a briefing that the regulator wanted to prevent a recurrence of the problems that brought down FTX, as well as other fraudulent behavior. More than 20 crypto and blockchain companies from mainland China, Europe, Canada and Singapore have told the government they are planning to establish a presence in Hong Kong, while over 80 firms have expressed interest in doing so, according to official figures.

America's Department of Defense "is gearing up for a future conflict in space," reports the Wall Street Journal, "as China and Russia deploy missiles and lasers that can take out satellites and disrupt military and civilian communications." The White House this month proposed a $30 billion annual budget for the U.S. Space Force, almost $4 billion more than last year and a bigger jump than for other services including the Air Force and the Navy.... A key aim of a stand-alone force was to plan, equip and defend U.S. interests in space for all of the services and focus attention on the emerging threats. For the first time, the spending request also includes plans for simulators and other equipment to train Guardians, as Space Force members are known, for potential battle....

Just as it is on Earth, China is the Pentagon's big worry in space. In unveiling a defense strategy late last year, the Biden administration cast China as the greatest danger to U.S. security. In space, the threats from China range from ground-launched missiles or lasers that could destroy or disable U.S. satellites, to jamming and other cyber interference and attacks in space, said Pentagon officials. China has invested heavily in its space program, with a crewed orbiting station, developing ground-based missiles and lasers as well as more surveillance capabilities. This is part of its broader military aims of denying adversaries access to space-based assets.

China is "testing on-orbit satellite systems which could be weaponized as they have already shown the capability to physically control and move other satellites," Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force, told a congressional hearing this month. "There's nothing we can do in space that's of any value if the networks that process the information and data are vulnerable to attack," Gen. Saltzman said. A central part of the Space Force's next tranche of military contracts for rocket launches is protecting them from attacks by China and other adversaries. The hope is to make satellites tougher to approach by adversaries' equipment as well as less susceptible to lasers and jamming from space or the ground, said Space Force leaders.
The article also notes the US Defense Department "is moving away from a small number of school bus-size satellites to a planned constellation of hundreds of smaller ones.

"The larger number of targets makes any one satellite less crucial to the network but also requires changes in the capabilities of the satellites themselves, the rockets that put them into orbit and the communications systems they host."

"Chinese officials have released an updated analysis of more than 1,300 samples taken from the Wuhan wet market at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic," reports the Telegraph: In a preprint published on Wednesday, researchers from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said there was "convincing evidence" that Sars-Cov-2 was spreading widely at Wuhan's Huanan seafood market in January 2020.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, tells them "This data could and should have been shared three years ago." China's paper then called for "more work involving international coordination" to investigate the potential origins of SARS-CoV-2. "Surveillance of wild animals using a viromic approach should be enhanced to explore the potential natural and intermediate hosts for SARS-CoV-2, if any, which would help to prevent future pandemics caused by animal-origin coronaviruses or alike, with a spillover event."

But the Telegraph notes that China also "claimed it's not clear how Covid got there, as no virus was found in the 457 animal swabs taken from 18 species at the market. The data behind the latest Chinese research has proved controversial, after a team of international experts downloaded the genetic sequences that had been discreetly shared on a database called GISAID. Their analysis was the first conducted on the data outside China, which has been accused by the World Health Organization of withholding critical clues. In samples taken from the Wuhan market that tested positive for Covid, the international team found genetic material from wildlife known to be susceptible to Sars-Cov-2 — including racoon dogs, palm civets and Himalayan marmots. This does not prove these animals were infected, but does confirm they were being illegally sold at Huanan market in early 2020.

"What we are seeing is the genomic ghost of that animal in the stalls," said Dr Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who first spotted the data when trawling GISAID. "It's close to the best [evidence] we can get, because the animals were gone when they came to sample the markets," she told the Telegraph earlier this month....

The latest paper from China CDC — published on ChinaXiv on Wednesday — reveals that although researchers sampled 18 species including bamboo rats, wild boars and hedgehogs, they did not take specimens from animals including raccoon dogs now known to be susceptible to the virus. It is likely that this is because they had already been removed. Some researchers said this undermines the China CDC's suggestion that animals did not bring the virus into the market — a route that China has consistently discredited, much like the potential for a laboratory leak, as it does not want the origin to be within its own borders. "This claim that no live animals with the virus were found at the market is one of the most pernicious and misleading talking points proffered," said Dr Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who led the international analysis.

"If no live raccoon dogs... or other plausible intermediate hosts species were tested (because they had all disappeared by the time this testing took place), then saying that the lack of Sars-CoV-2 live animals at the market is evidence against a zoonotic origin is at best misinformed. At worst, it is deliberate disinformation," he told the Telegraph.

In the US, heat pump purchases exceeded those of gas furnaces in 2022 -- part of a bigger trend that saw global heat pump sales grow by 11%. Electrek reports: According to analysis released today by the International Energy Agency (IEA), heat pump sales in Europe saw a record year, with sales growing by nearly 40%. And specifically, sales of air-to-water models in Europe that are compatible with typical radiators and underfloor heating systems jumped by almost 50%. In China, the world's largest heat pump market, sales remained stable amid a general slowdown of the economy.

Currently, heat pumps function as a main heating device in around 10% of buildings globally. That's the equivalent of over 100 million households, or 1 in 10 homes. But in order to meet climate goals, heat pumps will have to meet nearly 20% of global heating needs in buildings by 2030. If installations continue at the rate of the last two years, then the world may almost be on track to reach the 2030 goal. The IEA says that global heat pump sales will need to expand by well over 15% per year this decade if the world is to achieve net zero by 2050, and that multistory apartment buildings and commercial spaces in particular should be prioritized.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: China's chip industry will be "reborn" as a result of U.S. sanctions, a top boss at Huawei said Friday, as the Chinese telecommunications giant confirmed a breakthrough in semiconductor design technology. Eric Xu, rotating chairman at Huawei, issued fighting words against Washington's tech export restrictions on China. "I believe China's semiconductor industry will not sit idly by, but take efforts around ... self-strengthening and self reliance," according to an official translation of Xu's comments during a press conference. "For Huawei, we will render our support to all such self-saving, self-strengthening and self reliance efforts of the Chinese semiconductor industry."

The U.S. is concerned that China could use advanced semiconductors for military purposes. Huawei's Xu said these developments could boost, rather than hamper China's domestic semiconductor industry. "I believe China's semiconductor industry will get reborn under such sanctions and realize a very strong and self-reliant industry," Xu said. Last week, Huawei claimed to have completed work on electronic design automation tools for laying out and making chips down to 14nm process nodes.

"But Huawei ideally needs chips of a much smaller nanometer size for more advanced applications, which they are currently finding it difficult to obtain," adds Reuters. "The company is still reeling from the effects of U.S. sanctions -- on Friday, it said net profit dropped 69% year-on-year in 2022, marking the biggest decline on record."

Japan said on Friday it will restrict exports of 23 types of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, aligning its technology trade controls with a U.S. push to curb China's ability to make advanced chips. From a report: Japan, home to major chip equipment makers such as Nikon and Tokyo Electron, did not specify China as the target of the restrictions, saying manufacturers would need to seek export permission for all regions. "We are fulfilling our responsibility as a technological nation to contribute to international peace and stability," Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura told a news conference. Japan wants to stop its advanced technology being used for military purposes and does not have a specific country in mind, he said. But the decision, coming ahead of a weekend visit to Beijing by Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs Yoshimasa Hayashi, will be seen as a major win for the U.S., which in October announced sweeping restrictions on access to chipmaking technology to slow China's technological and military advances.

China has opened a cybersecurity review of imports from America's largest memory chipmaker, Micron Technology, opening a new front in the escalating battle between the two countries over dominance in the semiconductor market. From a report: The Chinese government is conducting the review to ensure the security of its information infrastructure supply chain, prevent network security risks and maintain national security, it said in a statement Friday. The move stands to further escalate trade tensions between the Biden administration and China. The US has already blacklisted Chinese tech firms, sought to cut off the flow of sophisticated processors and banned its citizens from providing certain help to the country's chip industry. It has called on other nations to join its efforts, and earlier on Friday, Japan said it will expand restrictions on exports of 23 types of leading-edge chipmaking technology.