Huawei: The tech giant is hoping its new phone can revive sales

9/26/23 7:00PM

Missing phone

‍On Monday, Huawei held its own big product launch, just a few weeks after Apple debuted its latest iPhone range. The Chinese tech giant made a lot of noise about new $200+ earbuds, and even teased 2 new electric vehicles, but conversation around the company’s new 5G phone, the Mate 60 Pro, was much more muted — with no new information on the gadget that should be a flagship product.

Thousands of fans took to Chinese social media to voice their anger, as the launch event became the hottest topic on Weibo — garnering 6 billion views on 1.6 million related posts. However, even though the 36-year-old company wasn’t shouting about it, the new handset is reportedly powering a sales surge for Huawei after revenues slipped in the last 2 years.

‍Dialing down

‍But it wasn’t just Huawei superfans who were keen to hear more about the new phone. The Mate 60 smartphone series, which was quietly launched by the Chinese tech giant last month, reportedly comes with a highly advanced semiconductor chip — sparking concerns in Washington that Huawei has circumnavigated US sanctions aimed at curbing China’s access to advanced chipmaking tools.

‍Huawei’s efforts to shift focus to its cloud and automotive divisions have helped sales grow in its most recent quarters — but the tech giant is likely to remain at the center of the sensitive tit-for-tat trade wars between the US and China for some time to come.

Congress Considers Bill To Force Sale Of TikTok

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Oracle’s potential TikTok takeover is a big deal to US competitors like Meta and Snap.

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Jon Keegan

Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, CoreWeave pledge $42 billion investment in UK AI projects during Trump’s visit

Nvidia, Microsoft, and CoreWeave announced pledges to invest tens of billions to build out the UK’s AI infrastructure.

Coinciding with President Trump’s visit to the UK, the companies announced new data centers, hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, and support for the UK’s sovereign AI programs.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are joining Trump for the visit.

Nvidia, CoreWeave, and UK AI infrastructure startup Nscale announced plans to roll out 120,000 Blackwell GPUs in UK data centers, including OpenAI’s “Stargate UK” data center project.

Part of the UK’s sovereign AI initiatives include the development of the country’s own “UK-LLM” and “Isambard-AI,” the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, which uses Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs.

Trump Lands in UK With Flurry of Pledges From Microsoft, Open AI

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are joining Trump for the visit.

Nvidia, CoreWeave, and UK AI infrastructure startup Nscale announced plans to roll out 120,000 Blackwell GPUs in UK data centers, including OpenAI’s “Stargate UK” data center project.

Rani Molla

Amazon launches AI chatbot to help create and distribute ads and ad agency investors don’t care

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Typically an announcement like this one pummels big advertising firms, whose livelihoods may or may not be threatened by the tech, but today Omnicom, Interpublic, WPP aren’t sinking on the news.

But perhaps the continuous stream of AI ad tool announcements from tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta is already baked into ad agencies’ stock prices. The ad agencies listed above are all down for the year.

Or perhaps these tools really are only for small businesses that can’t afford to work with big ad agencies.

“We’re not talking about professional marketers. These are customers that really need our help growing their business,” Jay Richman, Amazon’s vice president of product and technology, told The Wall Street Journal. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company expects to fully automate ad creation next year, said something similar on the company’s latest earnings call.

Amazon Aims to Grow Ad Sales Further by Automating Creation

Typically an announcement like this one pummels big advertising firms, whose livelihoods may or may not be threatened by the tech, but today Omnicom, Interpublic, WPP aren’t sinking on the news.

Or perhaps these tools really are only for small businesses that can’t afford to work with big ad agencies.

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Report: Anthropic’s refusal to allow Claude to be used for surveillance irks White House

The Trump administration’s warm embrace of AI companies has led to many federal agencies using chatbots from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic for many different applications.

Like its competitors, Anthropic is offering the government version of its chatbot — Claude for Government — for $1 per year to any agency that requests it, through the General Services Administration.

Semafor reports that contractors working for federal law enforcement agencies have encountered an obstacle: Anthropic’s policies don’t permit law enforcement to use Claude for surveillance applications. According to the report, Anthropic’s refusal to carve out an exception for federal law enforcement applications has “deepened hostility to the company” in the White House.

Under a section in Anthropic’s policy titled, “Do Not Use for Criminal Justice, Censorship, Surveillance, or Prohibited Law Enforcement Purposes,” the company explicitly prohibits the use of its products to “target or track a person’s physical location, emotional state, or communication without their consent, including using our products for facial recognition, battlefield management applications or predictive policing.”