Sakana AI shatters Japanese startup records by achieving a massive $2.6 billion valuation, officially becoming Japan's most valuable unicorn company and cementing its position as the nation's largest unlisted technology startup following its latest funding round worth approximately 400 billion yen.
Chinese state-sponsored hackers deploy AI system Claude Code to autonomously execute 90% of cyberattacks including reconnaissance and data theft, operating 24/7 at superhuman speeds while cybersecurity experts urgently call for AI-powered defenses to counter the escalating automated threat.
Baidu unveils ERNIE 5.0 multimodal AI model claiming to outperform GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro in visual tasks while pricing competitively at $0.85-$3.40 per million tokens as the Chinese tech giant expands globally with AI tools that already power 83% of livestreamers during major shopping events.
Baidu launches M100 and M300 AI chips set to debut in 2026 and 2027 respectively, directly challenging Nvidia's market dominance as China pushes for technological independence with domestic processors promising over 50% performance improvements.
Chinese AI firm Moonshot AI releases Kimi K2 Thinking, an open-source reasoning model that outperforms GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5, achieving record 44.9% on Humanity's Last Exam benchmark and marking a potential turning point as Chinese models now rival leading US systems.
Chinese AI lab Moonshot releases Kimi K2 Thinking, a free open-source reasoning model that reportedly outperforms GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 on major benchmarks while costing just $4.6 million to train, potentially disrupting the billion-dollar AI market and intensifying US-China competition.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warns China is winning the AI race despite U.S. chip bans, citing that 50% of global AI researchers and most leading open source models come from China while Beijing subsidizes energy costs for local alternatives.
Alibaba-backed Chinese startup Moonshot unveils 'Kimi K2 Thinking' AI model that reportedly outperforms ChatGPT in autonomous task completion while costing just $4.6 million to train versus OpenAI's billions, as major U.S. companies like Airbnb embrace cheaper Chinese alternatives amid escalating global AI competition.
SoftBank and OpenAI launch joint venture 'SB OAI Japan' to deploy exclusive AI solution 'Crystal Intelligence' across Japanese enterprises in 2026, with SoftBank already creating 2.5 million custom GPTs internally as the first validation user.
Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom unveil a massive €1 billion AI factory in Munich featuring over 1,000 DGX B200 systems and 10,000 Blackwell GPUs, set to boost Germany's AI computing power by 50% when it launches in early 2026.