Apple Inc. (AAPL.US) is collaborating with BABA-W (09988.HK) to develop an AI model tailored for the China market, with the model being trained with support from Alibaba, Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, reported.

Apple's latest approach differs from its previous practice. Previously, Apple tended to use models from domestic partners to introduce generative AI features into iPhones and other devices sold in China.

Apple's AI toolkit, Apple Intelligence, is purportedly expected to be officially launched in China in the coming months alongside updates to the iOS operating system.

BABA-W's share price moved lower with the broader market today, last reporting at HKD119.4, down 2.05%, with turnover of 33.2357 million shares involving HKD3.974 billion.
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LENOVO GROUP (00992.HK)'s adjusted net profit for the first fiscal quarter ended June spiked 176%. Chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing said the group may achieve its USD100 billion revenue target ahead of schedule in this financial year with the goal to pursue even higher profit.

Lenovo CFO Winston Cheng said the group's medium-term net profit margin target is around 5%, while the long-term goal is to achieve 8% or above.

Yang said he does not see an AI bubble emerging and assumed AI demand will continue to grow. Demand growth for memory products is expected to continue at least until the end of next year. Lenovo is currently in a favorable position to adjust early-stage pricing in a timely manner when raw material costs rise.

Although the market believes the group's strong earnings growth is mainly propelled by AI demand, AI business currently accounts for only a small portion of the group's operations, with traditional computing still remaining the core business, he added.

The group's current server order backlog exceeds USD50 billion, while the amount that can ultimately be converted into orders will depend on supply chain capabilities, Yang said.

Yang added the group is cooperating with NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) and plans to launch consumer AI PC products equipped with RTX series chips later this year.
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Social media company REDDIT, INC. (RDDT.US) is added to the S&P 500 Index, sending its share price higher by 12.45% in after-hours trading to USD177.8.

REDDIT will officially join the index next Tuesday (18th), replacing AVALONBAY COMMUNITIES, INC. (AVB.US).

Reddit, which operates thousands of online discussion communities covering different topics, will become the second pure-play social media company in the S&P 500 Index, alongside META PLATFORMS, INC. (META.US).
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The US has continued to step up efforts to tame Beijing's technological ambitions, but from AI to EV batteries, Chinese technology is becoming increasingly embedded in the operations of some of the world's largest corporations.

Apple Inc. (AAPL.US) has adopted AI technologies from BABA-W (09988.HK) and BIDU-SW (09888.HK) in China, while Ford Motor Company (F.US) is using CATL's battery technology. Volkswagen is cooperating with XPENG-W (09868.HK) to develop smart EVs in China, while Stellantis (STLA.US) is expanding cooperation with LEAPMOTOR (09863.HK) in EV production and joint procurement.

Analysts said a broad transformation is underway, with Chinese companies becoming a source of technology and innovation that global corporations can no longer easily avoid.

Kitty Fok, Managing Director of IDC China, told CNBC that China was mainly a market where global companies sold products five years ago. Today, in some industries, China has become the place where they acquire capabilities.

Nevertheless, Washington continues to toughen restrictions on Chinese technology.

Since placing Huawei on a blacklist in 2019, the US has imposed sweeping restrictions on advanced chips and chipmaking equipment, limited certain US investments in China's semiconductor, quantum technology and AI sectors, and added companies such as SMIC to restriction lists.

China has established a strong position in an increasing number of technology industries.

Soumen Mandal, Chief Analyst at Counterpoint Research, said automakers including BYD COMPANY (01211.HK), CHANGAN AUTOMOBILE (000625.SZ) and CHERY AUTO (09973.HK) accounted for nearly 63% of the global EV market in 2025, while battery manufacturers including CATL (03750.HK), BYD COMPANY, CALB (03931.HK) and GOTION HIGH-TECH (002074.SZ) accounted for close to 70%.

Mandal noted that cost, scale, manufacturing depth, supply chain integration and speed of innovation are key reasons global companies continue to work with Chinese firms.

He remarked that China's technological rise is shifting from low-cost manufacturing toward scale, supply chain depth and speed of innovation. He added that global companies are balancing geopolitical risks against commercial realities.
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Apple Inc. (AAPL.US) CEO Tim Cook on Wednesday joined government officials including US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to unveil a new manufacturing facility in Houston, Texas.

The facility will provide free training and educational courses for businesses, and will begin producing Mac Mini desktop computers later this year. Certain areas will also assemble Apple's AI servers.

Cook said the company has established the factory and started production, and has already shipped its first batch of advanced AI servers. Production of Mac Mini computers will begin later this year. He added that Apple has invested hundreds of millions of US dollars in the facility.

Apple also highlighted products manufactured within the US. Cook said Apple purchased more than 20 billion chips from the US last year, including 100 million chips sourced from TSMC (TSM.US)'s facility in Arizona.
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SK hynix, the global leader in HBM, is investing USD720 billion to build what it calls the world's largest memory factory network.

SK hynix's market cap has skyrocketed more than 5x over the past year and now exceeds USD1 trillion. According to Counterpoint Research data, SK hynix held a 58% share of the HBM market in 1Q26, followed by Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology of the US, both at 21%.

To support its large-scale capacity expansion, SK hynix raised USD26.5 billion through a Nasdaq listing in July, setting a record for the largest US market fundraising by a foreign company.

SK hynix also operates three memory wafer fabs in China, but US export controls prevent it from selling the most advanced HBM products to China. China also has emerging AI memory manufacturers including CXMT (688825.SH), whose recent Shanghai market listing has performed strongly.

MS Hwang, Research Director at Counterpoint Research, said that this is a race, and the competitor now is China. That will be a bigger threat than anything else in the world.
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MINIMAX-W (00100.HK) said that one week after H3 was open-sourced, it has continued to rank among the most popular projects on AI and machine learning open-source community platform Hugging Face, and has already derived nearly 300 models. Downloads of the ComfyUI version approached 7 million.

The company noted that the open portion of the H3 model contains about 60 billion parameters, while BF16 weights require about 120GB of memory, way beyond the VRAM capacity of most consumer-grade GPUs.

Following the open-source release, the community has actively optimized inference efficiency and hardware compatibility, giving H3 the opportunity to run on more developers' devices.

Among them, a research team from NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) used Sol Engine on the first day of H3's open-source release to complete the first round of inference optimization within 4.5 hours.
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By shipments in the NAND flash market in 2Q26, Samsung (005930.KS), SK hynix Inc. (SKHY.US) and YMTC accounted for 25%, 22% and 14% market share respectively, data from market research firm Counterpoint showed. This marked the first time that YMTC entered the top three globally by market share.

However, by revenue, YMTC ranked fifth in the industry, behind Micron Technology, Inc. (MU.US) and Kioxia (285A.JP), mainly because its product mix is concentrated in consumer applications, while the proportion of higher-priced enterprise SSDs for data centers is relatively low.
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Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, charted a record profit of NOK1.75 trillion (approximately USD184.3 billion) in 1H.

As of the end of June, the fund held a 0.05% stake in SpaceX (SPCX.US), valued at USD1.22 billion. Compared with the fund's holdings in other technology stocks, the stake size was relatively moderate.

The fund held a 1.28% stake in NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US), valued at USD62 billion, and a 1.24% stake in Apple Inc. (AAPL.US), valued at USD52 billion, data showed. Meanwhile, the fund also held stakes in Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL.US), Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US) and TSMC.
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Morningstar senior equity analyst Brian Colello said NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) recently announced strategic partnerships with six major financial institutions, namely Apollo Global Management (APO.US), Blackstone Inc. (BX.US), BlackRock, Inc. (BLK.US), Brookfield Asset Management Inc (BAM.US), Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS.US) and KKR & Co. Inc. (KKR.US), with the aim of establishing an AI computing infrastructure financing platform.

The plan involves deploying more than USD500 billion of third-party capital into AI infrastructure development. Colello believed NVIDIA's consolidation of financial partners to channel long-term capital into AI infrastructure construction will reinforce its core position in the AI ecosystem.

The firm upheld its fair value estimate of USD280 per share for NVIDIA and continued to believe that the company's medium- and long-term growth prospects are underestimated. The cooperation is in line with NVIDIA's overall strategy of driving rapid growth in its AI business.
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