SoftBank’s market cap topped Toyota’s on Monday for the first time in 23 years, lifted by its ~$65bn OpenAI stake and a Nikkei breaking 67,000 for the first time. SoftBank Group overtook Toyota Motor on Monday to become Japan’s most valuable listed company, the first time the auto giant has been dethroned from the top […]
Samsung Electronics and LG Uplus signed a memorandum of understanding on 27 May to jointly develop Integrated Sensing and Communication, or ISAC, a technology that would allow mobile network base stations to double as environmental sensors. The agreement was signed at LG Science Park in Magok, Seoul, with Samsung Research, the advanced R&D division within […]
GPT-5.5-Cyber will reach MUFG, SMBC and Mizuho through a verified-defender programme, the finance minister said, as Tokyo treats frontier AI as both threat and shield. The same models that make cyberattacks cheaper to run are now being handed, deliberately, to the people defending against them. Japan’s three megabanks will gain access to OpenAI’s latest model […]
Samsung’s 10.5%-of-profit bonus formula is only the second written profit-share agreement at a major Korean firm. Kakao’s union is already asking for more. Samsung Electronics’ unionised workforce voted in favour of the government-mediated pay agreement on Wednesday, formally closing the deal that narrowly survived an injunction filing from a smaller non-chip union on Tuesday. The vote […]
Three suspects, including a Super Micro senior vice president, are accused of exporting US-restricted servers through false documents to Japan and then on to mainland China. Taiwanese prosecutors suspect that three individuals successfully smuggled at least one shipment of Nvidia AI chips to mainland China after first exporting them to Japan, according to a Bloomberg […]
Samsung Electronics will invest 39 trillion dong, or about $1.5bn, in a semiconductor testing plant in Vietnam, according to a document seen by Reuters on Wednesday. Construction has already begun in an industrial park 60 kilometres north of Hanoi, with operations scheduled to start in November 2027. The plant will be Samsung’s first dedicated chip-testing […]
SPARQ, a UAE-based startup building what it calls an AI-native game engine, has opened an $8.5m seed round with early participation from the a16z Scout Fund, the vehicle Andreessen Horowitz uses to back early-stage deals through external scouts. The cheque size from the scout fund was not disclosed; typical a16z scout deals run between $10,000 and […]
South Korea’s Deputy Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon said the wealth created by artificial intelligence must benefit the wider public, warning that the labour tensions that nearly shut down Samsung Electronics this week are not an isolated event but a preview of what the AI era will produce. Speaking to CNBC on Friday, Bae said that […]
