OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and Kakao, South Korea’s market leader, announced on Tuesday ( Feb.4 ) that they intend to form a strategic partnership to create AI products for the Korean market. Kakao added that it will use OpenAI systems in all of its products. Sam Altman, the CEOContinue Reading
When then-prime minister Najib Razak announced the East Coast Rail Link (ECRL ) project in 2016, he estimated it would cost RM55 billion. The following year, it was revealed that the ECRL’s construction had value RM65.5 billion in full.
After that, it was claimed that the project’s costs were exaggerated because Chinese state-owned companies were agreeing to pay the enormous debts of troubled sovereign wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad ( 1MDB).
His new administration planned to resign the ECRL in order to save money when the Pakatan Harapan ( PH) coalition came into power in 2018 under Mahathir Mohamad, the next premier.
But in 2019, the PH state, eager to avoid paying a hefty termination charge of RM21.78 billion, later renegotiated the ECRL partnership and road position, bringing the price down to RM44 billion.
Mahathir claimed that the overall cost of the loan would be decreased as well, with lower interest rates and fees being paid on the loan, though no specific figures were provided.
The ECRL’s realignment was also politically motivated because the PH government proposed a southern route through the state of Negeri Sembilan, which is home to Transport Minister Anthony Loke’s Seremban district.
The new Perikatan Nasional government, which included Barisan Nasional ( BN ) from Najib, largely followed its original plan and revised the cost estimate to RM50 billion in 2020.  ,
The political conflict continued, with the new alignment alleged to have spanned at least five parliamentary constituencies that were all heavily contested and lost by BN component parties during the 2008 and 2013 general elections.
After the election of Anwar Ibrahim as prime minister in 2022, he declared in December that year his administration would start using the ECRL at a “reduced” cost of almost RM75 billion, revealing that the cost at the time of approval in 2016 was close to RM86 billion.
The cost of construction, which totals RM50.27 billion, and other costs, including interest fees during construction and land acquisition costs, total RM24.69 billion.
Anwar reaffirmed that his government will not significantly alter the project to prevent putting off its completion and putting incontrovertible steps and negotiations.
Five months after Beijing’s freely controlled island, which Taiwan now calls its own territory, publicly endorsed BRI in November 2017 as the first Latin American nation. China rejects criticism from European countries for the plan, saying that more than 100 nations have joined it, which will promote global development throughContinue Reading
To improve the effectiveness of its domestic market competition and prevent issues that may come from US trade restrictions, Mitsubishi Electric, a Chinese manufacturer of programmable logic controllers and other business automation equipment, plans to establish full supply chains in China.
Initial steps are anticipated to result from Mitsubishi Electric’s regional partnerships and purchasing, with investments and other arrangements beginning in the upcoming year. More cutting-edge products are likely to observe, but at a rate that won’t derail Japan’s production, employment, and industrial leadership.
Kuniaki Masuda, the company’s CFO, told the Nikkei that Mitsubishi Electric will be able to satisfy demand by sourcing products solely from China in the future, even though the company now exports items to China from Japan and other nations.
This is consistent with Western businesses like ABB, Volkswagen, and Bosch, which have all established or are expanding their operations in China.
In programmable logic controllers ( PLCs ), Mitsubishi Electric competes with Siemens and Fanuc in computerized numerical control ( CNC ) systems, as well as Siemens and Rockwell Automation. It also makes industrial robots, human-machine interfaces ( interactive screens ), servomotors, inverters, power distribution and control equipment, and other products used in factory automation.
Mitsubishi Electric is well established in China, with a office in Beijing, income offices in other major cities, factories producing business automation technology, elevators and escalators, air conditioners and energy silicon devices, R&, D centers in Beijing and Shanghai, and a research collaboration in electricity systems and environmental technologies with Tsinghua University.
In 2018, Mitsubishi Electric announced a” strategic partnership” between two of its group companies, Mitsubishi Electric ( China ) and Mitsubishi Electric Automation ( China ), and China’s state-owned Instrumentation Technology and Economy Institute ( ITEI ) to support Beijing’s” Made in China 2025″ initiative:
The Chinese government released its Made in China 2025 roadmap in 2015, stating that it would help China become a global manufacturing powerhouse. Mitsubishi Electric Group built its Smart Manufacturing Comprehensive Test Platform [which ] in order to support standardized intelligent manufacturing…
In a joint effort to support Made in China 2025, the strategic partnership [with ITEI] will concentrate on promoting defined intelligence production. Mitsubishi Electric will continue to support the… Platform with the company’s most recent FA components and technologies and verify the use of cutting-edge technologies like edge computing and artificial intelligence ( AI ) for intelligent manufacturing. The company hopes that with these efforts, it can promote standard, smart manufacturing for use in China.
In 2025, Mitsubishi Electric will expand its strategic relationship with China and more integrate its business automation business with the world’s largest manufacturing nation.
In China, it’s competing with it. They include Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Denso, Epson Robots and Nachi-Fujikoshi from Japan, ABB and Kuka ( now owned by China’s Midea Group ) from Europe, and Rockwell Automation from the US.
All of these businesses have regional colleagues and produce some goods in China. In Shanghai, ABB runs one of the most technologically advanced and largest technology companies in the world. It has participated in Belt and Road activities as well as Made in China.
Rockwell Automation, which entered the Chinese market in 1988, has facilities around the nation that serve a wide range of companies. The US government was reportedly looking into the possibility that the business was “exposing important US system, military, and other state assets to a potentially severe cyberattack through one of its China-based services” in 2023, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Rockwell Automation stated at the time that it hadn’t been informed of any inquiries but that it would work with it whenever needed. Bloomberg wrote that an analysis” did show US anxiety on China.”
However, US officials are now more concerned and willing to impose sanctions on both China and their supporters. In this scenario, Mitsubishi Electric’s decision to isolate its supply chains for business automation in China makes sense both politically and economically.
Mitsubishi Electric’s two main industrial automation products are programmable logic controllers ( PLCs ) and computerized numerical control ( CNC ) systems. The firm has a number of well-known rivals in each item and a long list of Chinese rivals trying to succeed.
As defined by Israeli robotics company Unitronics“, A Programmable Logic Controller, or PLC, is a rugged machine used for commercial technology. These controllers can manage a particular method, system work, or even an entire generation line. The PLC receives information from connected sensors or input devices, processes the data, and triggers outputs based on pre-programmed parameters. PLCs are employed to operate industrial robots.
Computer numerical control ( CNC ) is a manufacturing technique that automates the control, movement, and precision of machine tools through the use of pre-programmed computer software, according to the technology website Informa TechTarget. CNC systems are also employed with other types of industrial equipment.
Other top producers of PLCs include Siemens ( Germany ), Rockwell Automation ( USA ), ABB ( Switzerland/Sweden ), Schneider Electric ( France ), Omron ( Japan ) and Delta ( Taiwan ). Chinese PLC producers include HollySys, Wecon, Inovance Technology, Chint, Kinco and Xinje. Fatek ( Taiwan ) and LS Electric ( South Korea ) also have a presence in China.
Other top producers of CNC systems besides Mitsubishi Electric include Fanuc ( Japan ), Siemens ( Germany ), Haas Automation ( USA ), Heidenhain ( Germany ), Okuma ( Japan ), DMG Mori ( Germany/Japan ) and Bosch ( Germany ).
Chinese producers of CNC systems include Guangzhou CNC, Shenyang Machine Tool, HuazhongCNC, Shenzhen Inovance, Nanjing Estun Automation, and close to a dozen other companies identified by DeepSeek, which notes that” …the industry is dynamic, with rapid advancements in smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0 technologies.”
The world’s largest industrial robot market is China. China accounted for 51 % of the total number of industrial robot installations worldwide and 41 % of the total stock in 2023 ( the most recent year for which complete data is available ), according to the International Federation of Robotics.
Mitsubishi Electric has an estimated 5-10 % of the Chinese industrial robot market, according to industry and market research sources, ranking below only Fanuc, ABB and Yaskawa. Its market share for CNC systems in China is thought to be 10-15 %, with a high end concentration.
According to various market research firms, China currently accounts for more than 30 % of the world’s machine tool market, and Chinese demand is projected to increase by as much as 50 % by 2030. The Chinese market for CNC systems accounts for between 10 % and 10 % of Mitsubishi Electric’s.
China accounted for 22 % of Mitsubishi Electric’s factory automation revenues in the fiscal year to March 2024, 15 % of its total sales, and 27 % of its operating profit. The Chinese market for industrial automation equipment is very large, expanding rapidly, and fiercely competitive. Both Mitsubishi Electric and its rivals cannot afford to lose it.
Follow this writer on , X: @ScottFo83517667
PUBLISHED: 3 Feb 2025 at 15: 29
Three Thai women have been saved after being duped into a human-egg-harvesting plot by Chinese gangsters in Georgia’s former Communist nation.  ,
Pavena Hongsakula, the leader of the Pavena Foundation for Children and Women, spearheaded the effort to open them.
Ms. Pavena claimed she learned about it from a different target who had been released and who had just paid the group about 70, 000 ringgit before going back to Thailand.
The target claimed that the human-egg farm’s victims had no money to pay for their freedom and that other Thai people were still imprisoned there.  ,
According to her, the foreign affairs authorities, a division led by Pol Maj Gen Surapan Thaiprasert, worked with Interpol and were able to assist three other people in returning to Thailand on January 30.
Speaking to media by a video on the charity’s Instagram page on Monday, one of the victims said she saw a task avertisement on Twitter promising an revenue of 400, 000 to 600, 000 baht.
She contacted the page, where she learned that it was lawful to act as a surrogate family for people who couldn’t have children in Georgia. According to the person, the company paid for the woman’s card software and other travel expenses.
In August, she and about ten others, under the direction of a Thai lady who is alleged to be a member of the gang, traveled to Georgia. They were taken to a location where there were four big homes and at least 100 Thai people currently living it upon arrival.
No people applied that for a surrogate mother, she claimed, because the place was run by Chinese criminals, and it turned out there were no such people there.  ,
Rather, they were given hormones to promote their eggs. Once a month the ladies were anaesthetised and their eggs collected, she said.  , Some of the people had not been paid at all.  ,
According to Ms. Pavena, the collected eggs were allegedly sold or otherwise trafficked in other nations for in-vitro fertilization ( IVF ).
According to the authorities, the investigation is ongoing and there might be additional rescue.  ,
According to the Pavena Foundation’s information, 257 Thais fell prey to human smugglers in 2024, of which 53 were found in Thailand and 204 in other countries. The base helped liberate 152 of them.  ,
Georgia does not have any particular regulations governing infertility. However, there are legal agreements between the businesses that offer their services and those that deal with infertility. The Georgian government has stated that it is preparing to declare it illegitimate.  ,
Artificial fires through a lot of tools. Perhaps a more energy-efficient AI is likely to result in more energy being used over the long run, as a conundrum was first discovered in the 1860s.
For most consumers, “large speech models” such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT function like instinctive search engines. However, AI models return information they’ve created from scratch, in contrast to traditional online searches that locate and retrieve data everywhere along a worldwide network of servers. Like powering up a nuclear furnace to use a computer, this designed process is quite wasteful.
One study suggests the AI industry will be consuming somewhere between 85 and 134 terrawatt-hours ( TWh ) of electricity by 2027. That’s the same amount of energy that the Netherlands consumes annually. One well-known researcher predicts that over 20 % of US electricity will be used to power AI data centers ( huge warehouses stuffed with computers ) by 2030.
Big tech companies have often vowed to be significant investors in wind and solar energy. However, most people are developing their own atomic options due to AI’s desire for 24/7 energy. Microsoft also plans to revive , the legendary Three Mile Island , power flower, the image of America’s worst-ever legal radioactive accident.
Despite Google’s ambitious goal of being carbon neutral by 2030, the agency’s AI improvements mean its emissions have climbed 48 % in the past few years. Additionally, each month, the processing power required to train these concepts increases tenfold.
Nevertheless, Chinese start-up DeepSeek claims to have created a fix: a design that fits the effectiveness of established US foes like OpenAI, but at a fraction of the cost and carbon footprint.
DeepSeek has created a powerful open-source, relatively energy-lite model. The company claims it spent just US$ 6 million renting the hardware needed to train its new R1 model, compared with over$ 60 million for Meta’s Llama, which used 11 times the computing resources.
DeepSeek uses a “mixture-of-experts” architecture, a machine-learning method that allows the model to scale up and down depending on the complexity of prompts. The manufacturer claims that its model can train and store more data without using sizable amounts of pricey processor chips.
Following investor concerns that AI companies would reevaluate their energy-intensive data center developments, US chip manufacturing and energy stocks fell. As the world’s largest supplier of specialist AI processors, Nvidia saw its share price fall by$ 589 billion, the biggest one-day loss in Wall Street history.
Paradoxically, as well as upsetting the performance of US tech stocks, improving the energy efficiency of AI platforms could actually worsen the industry’s environmental performance as a whole.
With tech stocks crashing, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tried to bring a longer-term perspective:” Jevons paradox strikes again”! he posted on X. ” As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can’t get enough of”.
For more than a century, people have been saying that using less energy isn’t always beneficial to Earth’s resources. In his book” The Coal Question” in 1865, a young Englishman named William Stanley Jevons argued that Britain’s position as an industrial superpower might soon be ended as a result of its rapidly dwindling coal reserves.
But to Jevons, frugality was not the solution. He claimed that” the idealism that the sparse use of fuel is equivalent to a decreased consumption is completely confounds all other ideas. The very contrary is the truth”.
According to Jevons, any increase in resource efficiency generates an increase in long-term resource consumption, rather than a decrease. Higher energy efficiency has the effect of lowering energy’s implicit price, which in turn raises the rate of return and demand.
Jevons gave an example of the British iron industry. If advances in technology enabled a blast furnace to produce iron with less coal, profits would increase and new investment in iron production would be drawn. Price reductions would also encourage higher demand. He concluded:” The greater number of furnaces will more than make up for the diminished]coal ] consumption of each”.
Since the dawn of human civilization, the economist William Nordhaus has used this concept to improve lighting efficiency.
In a paper published in 1998, he came to the conclusion that the typical worker in ancient Babylon might need to work for more than 40 hours to buy enough fuel to generate the same amount of light as a typical lightbulb for an hour. However, an average American would need to produce the same amount of work by 1992.
Throughout time, efficiency gains haven’t reduced the energy we expend on lighting or shrunk our energy consumption. We now, in contrast, produce so much electric light that areas without it have turned into tourist attractions.
Warming and lighting our homes efficiently, driving our cars, mining Bitcoin and, indeed, building AI models are all subject to the same so-called rebound effects identified in the Jevons paradox. And because of this, it will be impossible to guarantee that an energy-use reduction in the overall industry is achieved.
In the 1950s, the US was horrified when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first space satellite. America spent more money on the space race, not less, as a result of the development of a more effective rival.
DeepSeek is Silicon Valley’s Sputnik moment. In an arms race that is no longer limited to US tech giants, more distributed and powerful models will likely mean more distributed and powerful models.
AI offers superpower status, and the floodgates may now be fully open for the UK and other global competitors, as well as China. What’s for certain is that in the long term, the AI industry’s appetite for energy and other resources is only going to increase.
Peter Howson is assistant professor in international development, Northumbria University, Newcastle
This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The economy ministry’s plan to offer assistance to businesses that are moving to the United States, including by assisting them in finding partners on the ground, was announced on Monday ( Feb 3 ) by Taiwan’s economy ministry. Trump’s requests for more charges of 25 per share on imports fromContinue Reading
NEW DELHI: India does not want to offer any indication that it is mercantilist, the best official in the banking department said, after slashing buy duties on high-end motorcycles, amid US President Donald Trump’s moves on tariffs. Trump sparked a trade war by imposing massive taxes on Canada, Mexico, andContinue Reading
Private surveys released on Monday ( Feb. 3 ) showed that Asia’s factory activity decreased in January as a result of soft Chinese demand and President Trump’s threat of higher tariffs, lowering the outlook for the region’s economy. The most recent stock observations come as the world’s markets sag afterContinue Reading
By selling technology companies to immigrants, America has financed a current account deficit that soared to US$ 1.2 trillion in 2024. Tech stocks, however, are trading at valuations not seen since 2000, when the NASDAQ Composite began a descent that wiped out 75 % of its market capitalization by 2002.
If expectations deteriorate regarding synthetic intelligence’s ability to generate revenue, was a technology crash lead to a financing crisis for the United States? The question of the January 27 collision in AI-related stocks in response to less expensive and more effective Chinese rivals still lingers. Every capital investment in the world pays close attention to these issues.
Europeans stopped buying US debts of all kinds – Treasury, loan, and business – after the post-Covid prices of 2021 and the Federal Reserve’s subsequent rise in interest rates. That signaled the end of a 40-year bulls industry in US securities. From a 1981 peak of 15 %, the US 30-year bond yield fell in a nearly straight line to an August 2020 low of just 1.41 %.
The inflationary wave of 2021-2022 put an end to this bull work. In March 2022, moreover, the US and its allies seized half of Russia’s$ 600 billion in foreign exchange reserves, prompting other central banks to shift away from US Treasury securities to gold and other assets.
However, the world’s appetite for American tech stocks has been stagnant for the past ten years, which was rekindled by the development of Large Language Models ( LLMs) last year. Are raised valuations for AI-related shares justified? Which two aspects affect how quickly and which industries are most likely to make money from AI?
China’s DeepSeek R1 type appears to have made a model performance discovery: tale layout and related improvements reduce the amount of processing required by one or two orders of magnitude.
DeepSeek, also, offers its unit at a small fraction of the price that its US competitors then charge. That is not always detrimental to the overall US tech sector. If China has a better systems, US companies may choose it speedily, and lower costs for AI simulation does benefit the users of AI models.
US and China compete in seven distinct subcategories of AI uses. China leads most of them, and its Artificial skills are likely to strengthen it. They are
The big question is about LLM’s timing. Although the payoff might be significant, it may not be as quick as anticipated.
LLM deployment in the enterprise still has little to do with organizational performance and human adaptation ( management buy-in, workflow adjustments, etc. ). seems to be years away. Cost savings for specific categories of expenses, such as call centers or repetitive coding tasks, may be easily realized. However, the development of AI for higher-skill work is still in its infancy.
What does this mean for Nvidia’s chipmakers? On the assumption that Nvidia GPUs will provide a lot of this activity, one could argue a bullish case for Nvidia based on all of the AI sectors listed above. However, this hypothesis requires closer scrutiny of Nvidia’s competitive advantages.
Nvidia has a greater advantage in computation when training language and vision models, but less so when inference ( running the resulting models to get useful results ) is at its disposal. Notably, Huawei’s Ascend AI chips already perform fairly well with the new DeepSeek models, with comparable or even better cost performance than the weakened Nvidia H800s ( the weakened Nvidia chip that was cleared for export to China )  .
Additionally, the case that the top US tech companies ( the so-called Magnificent Seven ) will control equity returns going forward is much weaker than the market is currently perceptive of it. If we are right, and tech market valuations shrink to some significant extent, what are the macroeconomic implications? Key capital flows are more dependent on a small number of very large companies than at any other time in US history.
Let’s say foreigners reduced their purchases of tech stocks as the value of the stocks declines. The United States would need to sell more bonds to both domestic and foreign investors to pay off its current account deficit and federal budget deficit. The chart below shows the amount of new Treasury debt bought by US banks, US households, foreign official institutions, and foreign private investors, respectively.
Banks stepped in and reabsorbed the$ 4 trillion in Covid subsidies that were funded by the Treasury debt, but by 2023 they had exhausted their savings deposits. Households, who were drawn to the higher interest rates on Treasuries, saw the biggest increase in new investment in Treasury securities. Additionally, foreign private investors decreased their Treasury holdings.  ,
A full-blown financial crisis is most unlikely. The cash-burning dotcoms of 2000 have been replaced by cash-rich monopolies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta. By offering higher bond yields to domestic and international investors, the United States can adjust to an air-pocket in the demand for its tech stocks.
However, the DeepSeek shock exposes flaws in Big Tech’s core strategies as well as in the stratospheric valuation of its best-performing stocks. The outcome is likely to be a combination of persistently higher interest rates, slower growth, a decline in wealth, and strong economic headwinds.
The S&, P’s technology sector, correspondingly, trades at a P/E of 37, compared to an overall P/E for the S&, P 500 of 26. That accounts for the largest portion of the difference between the lofty valuations of American stocks and those of European, Japanese, and Chinese stocks.
A brass-tacks gauge of equity valuation is the free cash flow (FCF ) yield, namely the ratio of cash income to market price. Investors accept less current income because they anticipate higher income in the future, the higher the FCF is expected to be. For the S&, P 500 as a whole, FCF is below 3, a level not seen since the eve of the tech stock crash of 2000.
For a monopoly like Microsoft, the free cash flow yield has fallen to just 2, the lowest on record.
Between 2020 and 2024, Big Tech invested more than double in capital expenditures, and it is still investing heavily in AI-supporting data centers. The DeepSeek shock raises questions about the viability of these plans economically: If Chinese developers can create cutting-edge models using innovative model architecture designs, the raw computing power under development could be significantly overvalued.
To entice price-sensitive buyers into the Treasury market, the US government—still running a record peacetime non-recession deficit of 6 % to 7 % of GDP—probably will have to offer higher yields. That’s a problem for the economy and also a problem for the Treasury, which is already paying$ 1 trillion a year in interest, nearly quadruple the service cost of America’s national debt in 2020.
It also puts a headwind in front of the US economy for interest-sensitive activity, particularly housing. Longer-term, the US runs the risk of an Italian-style spiral, in which the rising cost of debt service eats away at the budget and limits what the federal government can do to support the economy.
Steve Hsu is professor of theoretical physics and of computational mathematics, science, and engineering at Michigan State University, and the founder of several AI startups. Follow him on X at @hsu_steve. David P. Goldman serves as Asia Times ‘ deputy editor. Follow him on X at @davidpgoldman