Investors love an acronym. In recent months they have embraced the TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) trade. They once swooned over the FAANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google). During Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis of the 2010s traders fretted over the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain). A good memory for initials takes a financial historian a long way. More
“Hezbollah finds itself in its greatest predicament since its foundation,” one regional expert told CNBC.
Hezbollah makes money from industries like banking and construction, but also runs international drug trafficking and smuggling operations as far afield as Bulgaria and Argentina. Its revenues are estimated in the billions of dollars annually.
Following Israel’s aggressive assault – its most deadly since the 2006 war – Hezbollah’s leadership and financial infrastructure have been pushed to the brink.
Vehicles transporting people who had fled southern Lebanon are slowed down by heavy traffic on the outbound road from Beirut, in the area of Khaldeh on November 28, 2024, a day after a cease fire between Israel and Hezbollah took hold.
Ibrahim Amro | Afp | Getty Images
Up until a few months ago, the drive from Beirut’s international airport through the Lebanese capital city’s southern suburbs used to feature a stream of pro-Iranian and Hezbollah-themed propaganda.
Hassan Nasrallah, the charismatic former leader of the Iran-backed group who was killed in Beirut last year, stared down at you from billboards while you drove along Imam Khomeini Road, named after the late founder of Iran’s Islamic Republic. Images of Hezbollah leaders were interspersed with dramatic murals of fallen Iranian spy commander Qasem Soleimani.
Now many of those images have been replaced with western and local brands. In June dozens of those billboards along the highway instead featured Formula One racecar driver Lewis Hamilton advertising shaving products.
Many of the new posters also feature patriotic, unifying messages that replaced the formerly sectarian signage — an attempt by Lebanon’s new Prime Minister Nawaf Salam to encourage “A New Era for Lebanon,” just in time for the summer tourism boom the Mediterranean country is hoping for after months of war.
In this “new” Lebanon, Hezbollah is being forced to operate in the shadows — more than ever in the group’s over 40-year history.
The Iranian proxy, which controls several parts of Lebanon as a sub-state group and is designated a terrorist organization by Washington, has always looked for creative ways to evade U.S. sanctions. But since Israel’s aggressive assault – its most deadly since the 2006 war – Hezbollah’s leadership and financial infrastructure have been left in tatters.
“Hezbollah finds itself in its greatest predicament since its foundation. The Israeli war against Lebanon greatly hit the party and its infrastructures, assassinating the party’s senior military and political leaders including Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah,” Joseph Daher, author of “Hezbollah: The Political Economy of Lebanon’s Party of God,” told CNBC.
“The regions majorly inhabited by the Shia population have been greatly targeted, destroying extensively civilian housing and infrastructures as well,” he said.
A vehicle carries the coffins of former Hezbollah leaders Hassan Nasrallah and Hashem Safieddine, who were killed in Israeli airstrikes last year, during a public funeral ceremony, in Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium, on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon, on Feb. 23, 2025.
Thaier Al-sudani | Reuters
The group, whose political wing also holds seats in parliament, still wields significant political power in Lebanon, which last held parliamentary elections in 2022. Despite losing the most significant number of seats in the group’s political history, it still held tight to a 62-seat coalition in the 128-member parliament.
While Hezbollah “will not disappear because it has a strong, disciplined and organized political and militant structure, and benefits from the continued assistance of Iran,” the group “has become increasingly politically and socially isolated outside Lebanon’s Shia population,” Daher said.
Outside the banking system
While Hezbollah receives much of its funding from Iran, it has also developed extensive international financial networks to bring in revenue. The group makes money from traditional industries like banking and construction, but it also runs smuggling, money laundering and international drug trafficking operations around the Middle East and as far afield as Bulgaria and Argentina. Its revenues are estimated in the billions of dollars annually.
FILE PHOTO: Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah gestures as he addresses his supporters during a rare public appearance at an Ashoura ceremony in Beirut’s southern suburbs November 3, 2014.
Hasan Shaaban | Reuters
Hezbollah’s parallel governance strategy, operating as both a political party and sub-state group, has enabled it to survive and grow as an armed group for decades.
When Lebanese depositors were locked out of their savings in 2019 after a financial meltdown crippled the country and its currency, Hezbollah remained able to fund its base and illicit activities. It operated cash-only businesses and ran black market U.S. dollar exchanges.
This strategy will continue despite pressure on their finances, regional analysts say, due to the extreme difficulty of tracking informal, cash-only transactions.
Lebanon’s economy “operates more than 60% on cash exchanges, the circulation of which the state cannot trace,” Daher said. “It is thanks to the segment of this cash in circulation that Hezbollah smuggles into Lebanon that it finances its activities and pays its employees and helps its popular base, alongside other sources of funding, both licit and illicit.”
However, the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s administration is placing renewed pressure on Lebanon’s new government to crack down on Hezbollah’s illicit activities.
New government crackdowns
In an apparent blow to Hezbollah’s funding operations, Lebanon’s central bank, the Banque Du Liban (BDL), issued a directive banning all financial institutions in the country from any dealings with Al-Qard al-Hasan — a Hezbollah-linked financial entity that provides local loans by taking gold and jewelry as collateral. It’s a tool by which Hezbollah cements support from the country’s Shiite population and gets more funding for its operations. Israel has specifically targeted Al-Qard al-Hasan facilities with airstrikes in the last year.
The BDL move was “ingenious,” said Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute and director of its counterterrorism and intelligence program, because Al-Qard al-Hasan has long been registered as a charity and thus was able to operate outside the Lebanese financial system, evading regulatory oversight.
“Here, the BDL appears to have found a way to jump the gap and say, ‘whatever you are, people can’t provide services for you. You can’t bank, and anybody who does is violating the law,” Levitt said.
Black smoke rises above the Dahieh neighborhood after Israeli airstrikes on targets of Lebanese Hezbollah, widely believed to be the last of a series of strikes aimed at Hashem Safieddine, the likely successor of the assassinated previous Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who Israel announced has now been killed, near the southeast corner of the international airport on October 8, 2024 in Beirut, Lebanon.
Scott Peterson | Getty Images
Until recently, Hezbollah controlled almost all ports of entry in Lebanon, including the Beirut airport. Following Israel’s assault on the group, its airport is now under the control of the Lebanese government, which has fired staff linked to Hezbollah, detained smugglers, and implemented new surveillance technology.
And while Tehran is still funding its proxy group, its transport routes to Lebanon are dramatically restricted after losing a key ally with the fall of the Bashar al Assad regime in Syria. Flights coming in from Iran and other locations meant to bring in material support for Hezbollah are being heavily inspected, experts told CNBC.
“Cash transfers from abroad have been intercepted at the airport and border. We are talking about millions of dollars,” Daher said of the renewed security in the country.
‘The window of opportunity is now’
Many who want to see Hezbollah’s power dismantled say the time is now.
“When you now have Iran under tremendous stress, and Lebanon overtly trying to crack down on Hezbollah’s ability to function as an independent militia – and trying to target the funding it needs to be able to do that – you have an interesting opportunity,” Levitt, who also served as deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department, told CNBC in an interview.
For the first time in decades, both the prime minister and president of Lebanon are interested in asserting monopoly over the use of force in the country, he added.
“They’re interested in securing the much, much needed international aid that Lebanon needs to get out of the economic crisis, and they’re interested in not saying no to the Trump administration.”
But it’s not that easy. The group, long described as the most powerful non-state organization in the Middle East, is still loyally followed by hundreds of thousands of people who rely on it for social services and ideological leadership — and it remains well-armed.
Notably, no one is officially demanding Hezbollah disband or cease to exist entirely. Trump’s envoy to the region Tom Barrack recently demanded Hezbollah lay down its weapons, a proposition the group has rejected.
“Hezbollah’s not going to disarm because you ask them nicely,” Levitt said. “But we have to enable the government of Lebanon to do this, give them the capability to do it, and have their back when they do it.”
That requires a combination of carrots and sticks, former U.S. officials say – ironically, tools that have in many cases been weakened by the shrinking of U.S. government resources under the Trump administration.
Alexander Zerden, principal at Washington-based risk advisory firm Capitol Peak Strategies who formerly served at the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, outlined some of those potential approaches.
“On the offensive side, the U.S. can and will likely continue to target Hezbollah financial networks inside and outside of Lebanon. The U.S. will seek to deny Hezbollah access to Syria, including lucrative reconstruction contracts,” Zerden said.
“On the incentive side, direct tools are more limited with reductions in diplomacy and development capabilities,” he noted – one example of that being the gutting of USAID, which served as a powerful diplomatic vehicle. “However,” he added, “there appears to be space for the U.S. to support economic reforms.”
For Ronnie Chatah, a Lebanese political analyst and host of The Beirut Banyan podcast, what’s truly needed is international pressure that would push Iran to relinquish its involvement in Lebanon.
“What has not yet shifted in Lebanon’s favor is the international aspect, meaning finding a way for Iran to abandon Lebanon that I think can only happen by strategic diplomacy,” said Chatah, whose father, a former Lebanese finance minister, was killed in a suspected Hezbollah assassination plot.
“If the Trump administration wants peace the way it says repeatedly, if Donald Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize too, there has to be some way forward for Lebanon to take the spotlight and to find a peaceful resolution that in some ways satisfies Iran’s terms,” he told CNBC from Beirut.
What’s been done so far by both the U.S. and Lebanese governments is important, but will not ultimately break Hezbollah’s power in the country, Chatah warned.
“The window of opportunity is now. It’s not tomorrow, and unfortunately, it’s a closing window,” he said. “The intent is not enough. Whether it’s by the Trump administration or even whether it’s by the Lebanese president, the intention is not enough.” More
Barclays is the latest bank to beat estimates and report higher revenue from its investment banking this quarter, after U.S. tariffs triggered intense market volatility.
Pre-tax profit at the British lender came in at £2.5 billion, versus an analyst estimate of £2.23 billion, while revenues were in-line with forecasts at £7.2 billion.
Barclays is meanwhile delivering on its cost-reduction targets, CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan said.
One Churchill Place skyscraper, the Barclays Plc headquarters, at Canary Wharf in London, U.K., on Thursday, Jan. 7, 2021.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
British bank Barclays on Tuesday beat profit expectations and announced a £1 billion ($1.33 billion) share buyback as market volatility boosted investment banking revenues.
Pre-tax profit beat estimates at £2.5 billion ($3.34 billion) in the second quarter, compared with a mean LSEG forecast of £2.23 billion. Group revenues met analyst projections of £7.2 billion.
Other highlights:
Return on Tangible Equity hit 13.2% at the end of the first half, versus 14% in the first quarter.
Earnings per share rose to 11.7p from 8.3p.
CET1 capital ratio, a measure of bank solvency, was 14%, compared with 13.9% in the March quarter.
Investors have been watching the performance of the lender’s sharpened investment banking unit, which posted income of £3.3 billion in the three months to June, up 10% year-on-year. Higher net interest and trading income offset a fall in advisory fees and commissions at the unit.
Barclays is the latest bank to report higher earnings boosted by markets trading in a quarter that included the turbulent fallout from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policies announced in April. Global stocks plunged before staging a massive rebound, with Europe recovering ahead of the U.S. Currency markets have also been roiled, with the U.S. dollar suffering steep declines.
Deutsche Bank last week beat profit expectations, helped by strong performance in fixed income and currencies. Stateside, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley have been among those to report higher trading revenues.
The investment banking division is the traditional backbone of Barclays’ revenues and a target of cost reductions under CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan unveiled in February 2024. It saw further changes in recent months, amid the hire of former Deutsche Numis exec Alex Ham as global chairman, a report of plans to cut more than 200 jobs and a report the bank is tapping consultancy McKinsey to identify further room for cost cutting.
Venkatakrishnan said in a statement Tuesday: “We remain on track to achieve the objectives of our three-year plan, delivering structurally higher and more stable returns for our investors.” At its mid-point, the strategy has delivered half its target income growth, over half its U.K. risk weighted assets growth and two-thirds of its planned £2 billion in cost savings, he added.
Adding to Barclays’ challenges, pending changes in U.S. capital leverage rules could unleash further competition stateside — where the bank has had a significant presence since acquiring Lehman Brothers’ investment banking and capital markets businesses — in the British lender’s area of strength of debt markets.
Domestically, Barclays faces a shifting British banking landscape, where Spanish titan Santander has doubled down on its U.K. presence with the early-July acquisition of British high street lender TSB from Sabadell, and investors are watching for any change in strategic tack from NatWest, which returned to private ownership at the end of May.
Sticky inflation could meanwhile position the Bank of England to take a cautious approach to rate cuts, impacting the net interest margin of U.K. banks. More
JPMorgan Chase said the fintech companies that help financial apps connect with traditional checking accounts are flooding the bank’s systems with unnecessary data requests.
Of 1.89 billion data requests from middlemen hitting its systems in June, only 13% were initiated by a customer for transactions, according to an internal JPMorgan memo seen by CNBC.
The majority of data pulls, known as API calls, were for purposes ranging from helping fintech companies improve their products or prevent fraud to other efforts including harvesting data for sale, said a person with knowledge of the memo.
Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., at the Institute of International Finance (IIF) during the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Oct. 24, 2024.
Kent Nishimura | Bloomberg | Getty Images
JPMorgan Chase said fintech middlemen — the companies that have helped a new generation of financial apps connect with traditional checking accounts — are flooding the bank’s systems with unnecessary data requests.
“Aggregators are accessing customer data multiple times daily, even when the customer is not actively using the app,” a JPMorgan systems employee wrote last week in an internal memo to retail payments head Melissa Feldsher. “These access requests are massively taxing our systems.”
Of 1.89 billion data requests from middlemen hitting JPMorgan’s systems in June, only 13% were initiated by a customer for transactions, according to the memo, which was seen by CNBC.
The majority of data pulls, known as API calls, were for purposes ranging from helping fintech companies improve their products or prevent fraud to other efforts including harvesting data for sale, said a person with knowledge of the memo who declined to be identified amid talks between JPMorgan and the fintechs.
JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, is preparing to charge the middlemen new fees for access to systems that it says are increasingly costly to maintain. Negotiations between JPMorgan and the fintech middlemen are ongoing, but the new fees could start as soon as October, said people with knowledge of the matter.
The bank’s move could lead to upheaval in the fintech ecosystem, which flourished as aggregators including Plaid and MX connected traditional banks with newer arrivals. The API access had been free for years, allowing middlemen to profit from selling connectivity to fintechs that in turn offered accounts with no-fee checking or trading services.
The situation changed in May after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau filed a motion in support of a banking industry lawsuit seeking to end the so-called “open banking” rule.
That rule, finalized by the Biden-era CFPB in the waning months of that administration, mandated that banks had to provide data to authorized parties for free. A week after the rule’s passage, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon called on bankers to “fight back” against what he said were unfair regulations.
Surging volumes
News this month that JPMorgan was planning to charge for customer data, first reported by Bloomberg, led to accusations from venture capital investors and fintech and crypto executives that JPMorgan was engaging in “anti-competitive, rent-seeking behavior” by putting up paywalls to customer data.
But JPMorgan says it bears the rising costs from maintaining the infrastructure needed for the surge in volumes, as well as elevated fraud claims linked to payments made in the fintech ecosystem.
The total volume of API calls received by JPMorgan has more than doubled in the past two years, according to the memo.
Transactions involving money sent over electronic ACH transactions were 69% more likely to result in fraud claims if they involved data middlemen, according to the memo.
JPMorgan saw about $50 million in fraud claims from ACH transactions initiated through aggregators, a figure the bank expects to triple within 5 years, the memo said.
Among the 13 fintech companies tracked in the bank’s memo, more than half of all June activity, with 1.08 billion API requests, came from a single company. Though the firms aren’t named, CNBC has learned that the largest player represented in the data is Plaid.
JPMorgan’s data shows that just 6% of Plaid’s API calls were initiated by customers.
Plaid co-founders William Hockey and Zach Perret
Source: Plaid
Granting access
Plaid said in a statement to CNBC that this figure “misrepresents how data access works” because all activity begins when customers grant permission to fintech companies when they sign up for accounts. Of course, many customers don’t closely read the lengthy “Terms and Conditions” pages that contain data-sharing disclosures before opening new accounts.
“Calling a bank’s API when a user is not present once they have authorized a connection is a standard industry practice supported by all major banks in order for consumers to get critical alerts for overdraft fees or suspicious activity,” Plaid told CNBC.
Plaid also said that JPMorgan’s claims of higher fraud among aggregators were “misleading,” though it didn’t elaborate.
“It is not surprising that the volume of data access is increasing alongside demand from consumers for financial tools that are smarter, faster, and more tailored to their needs,” Plaid said.
“To be clear, we believe it is essential that the data sharing ecosystem works for everyone, including consumers, fintech developers, and financial institutions – many of whom leverage open banking in their own products,” the company said.
The proposed fee schedules circulated by JPMorgan could result in Plaid paying $300 million in new annual fees, according to a Forbes report.
The rest of the companies tracked in the JPMorgan document are far smaller entities; only four other middlemen registered more than 100 million monthly API calls.
Bid-ask spread
If the Biden-era “open banking” rule is struck down by the courts, the main question is not whether the middlemen will have to pay for data but how much they will have to pay.
The back-and-forth between JPMorgan and the middlemen is a private process, spilling into public view, to arrive at a new reality that is acceptable to all.
JPMorgan has had productive conversations with several data aggregators who acknowledge that they can change the way they pull data if it is no longer free, according to a person with knowledge of the negotiations.
“I think both sides fully acknowledge there are things they could do to right-size call volume,” this person said. More
Startup Z.ai, formerly known as Zhipu, announced Monday that its new GLM-4.5 AI model would cost less than DeepSeek to use.
Like DeepSeek, the new model is also open source and can be downloaded for free.
At about half the size of DeepSeek’s model, GLM-4.5 only needs eight Nvidia H20 chips to operate, Z.ai CEO Zhang Peng told CNBC on Monday.
The World Artificial Intelligence Conference kicked off in Shanghai on Saturday, July 26, 2025.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
BEIJING — Chinese companies are making smarter artificial intelligence models that are increasingly cheaper to use, echoing key aspects of DeepSeek’s market-shaking breakthrough.
Startup Z.ai, formerly known as Zhipu, announced Monday that its new GLM-4.5 AI model would cost less than DeepSeek to use. In contrast to the logic underlying existing AI models, Z.ai said its new GLM-4.5 is built on what’s known as “agentic” AI, meaning that the model automatically breaks down a task into sub-tasks in order to complete it more accurately.
The new model is also open sourced, meaning it is free for developers to download and use.
At about half the size of DeepSeek’s model, GLM-4.5 only needs eight Nvidia H20 chips to operate, Z.ai CEO Zhang Peng told CNBC on Monday.
That’s the chip Nvidia customized for China in order to comply with U.S. export controls. The chipmaker said this month that the U.S. will allow it to resume those China sales after a three-month pause, but it’s unclear when those shipments will begin.
Zhang said the company doesn’t need to buy more of the chips as it has enough computing power for now, but declined to share how much Z.ai spent on training the AI model. Details will be released later, he said.
Back in January, DeepSeek had rattled global investors with its apparent ability to defy U.S. chip restrictions and create an AI model that not only rivaled U.S.-based OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but also undercut it in training and operating costs.
DeepSeek claimed training costs for its V3 model were less than $6 million, although some analysts said that figure was based on the company’s hardware spend of more than $500 million over time.
Z.ai said that for its new GLM-4.5 model, it would charge 11 cents per million input tokens versus 14 for DeepSeek R1; and 28 cents per million output tokens versus $2.19 for DeepSeek. Tokens are a way of measuring data for AI model processing.
Earlier this month, Alibaba-backed Moonshot released Kimi K2, which claimed to beat OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude on certain coding capabilities. Kimi K2 charges 15 cents for every 1 million input tokens, and $2.50 per 1 million output tokens, according to its website.
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In late June, OpenAI named Zhipu in a warning about Chinese AI progress. The U.S. has also added the startup to its entity list that restricts American companies from doing business with it.
Z.ai launched in 2019 and is reportedly planning an initial public offering in Greater China.
The startup has raised more than $1.5 billion from investors including Alibaba, Tencent and Qiming Venture Partners, according to PitchBook. Aramco-backed Prosperity7 Ventures as well as municipal funds from the cities of Hangzhou and Chengdu are also among Z.ai’s backers, the database showed.
In the last few weeks, several other Chinese companies have announced new, open-source AI models. During the World AI Conference in Shanghai, Tencent released the HunyuanWorld-1.0 model for generating three-dimensional scenes for game development. Last week, Alibaba announced its Qwen3-Coder model for writing computer code. More
IonQ has hired the former head of applied research at JPMorgan Chase to help corporate clients of the quantum firm adopt next-generation hardware, algorithms and security, CNBC has learned.
Marco Pistoia, who was head of JPMorgan’s internal research group from 2020 to this year, will be joining IonQ as senior vice president of industry relations.
In his new role, Pistoia will report directly to IonQ CEO Niccolo de Masi and focus on helping corporations adopt both quantum computing and quantum-safe encryption.
Marco Pistoia, Global Technology’s Head of Applied Research and Engineering at JP Morgan.
Source: JP Morgan
IonQ has hired the former head of applied research at JPMorgan Chase to help corporate clients of the quantum firm adopt next-generation hardware, algorithms and security, CNBC has learned.
Marco Pistoia, who was head of JPMorgan’s internal research group from 2020 to this year, will join IonQ as senior vice president of industry relations, the quantum computing firm is expected to announce on Monday.
JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank by assets, recently overhauled the leadership of its research group, which worked on quantum computing and other advanced technologies. Quantum computing has the potential for tremendous advances over traditional computing, and tech giants as well as small publicly traded companies are racing to commercialize it.
IonQ is one of the larger examples of pure-play quantum companies. The company and competitors including Rigetti Computing and D-Wave have seen their shares surge in the past year, fueled by excitement in the nascent field.
In his new role, Pistoia will report directly to IonQ CEO Niccolo de Masi and focus on helping corporations adopt both quantum computing and quantum-safe encryption, he said during an interview last week.
‘Huge risk’
A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could theoretically break the encryption methods that keep the world’s financial data secure.
“There is a huge risk that quantum poses against cryptography, so we need the entire world to transition to quantum-safe cryptography,” Pistoia said.
Bad actors could “take any public key and reverse-engineer the corresponding private key,” he said.
The advent of a commercially usable quantum computer is rapidly approaching, according to Pistoia.
“I believe that usable quantum computers are much closer now; we are talking about two to three years from now,” he said.
Pistoia said that he hoped to continue collaborating with JPMorgan on quantum projects, as well as with other financial firms.
JPMorgan declined to comment on the matter. More
U.S. chip giant Nvidia didn’t have a booth at the World AI Conference that opened Saturday in Shanghai.
Its China rival, Huawei, had a large display — focused on its Ascend AI chips — near the venue’s entrance.
Tesla, Google, Amazon Web Services and Siemens were among the U.S. and European companies with booths at the AI conference.
Chinese telecoms giant Huawei showed off its Ascend chips and system for powering artificial intelligence models at the World AI Conference in Shanghai on July 26, 2025.
CNBC | Evelyn Cheng
BEIJING — Less than two weeks after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s high-profile visit to Beijing, the U.S. chipmaker was conspicuous by its absence at China’s biggest AI event of the year.
Despite renewed hopes this month of selling its less advanced H20 chips to China again, Nvidia didn’t have a booth at the World AI Conference that opened Saturday in Shanghai. The company declined CNBC’s request for comment.
In contrast, Nvidia’s China rival, Huawei, had a large display — focused on its Ascend AI chips — near the venue entrance. Huang has called Huawei “one of the most formidable technology companies in the world,” while warning that it could replace Nvidia in China if U.S. sticks with its export curbs on Beijing.
The telecoms giant showed off for the first time the hardware for its computing system that links 384 Ascend chips together to power AI model training and use. Huawei is marketing the product as “Atlas 900 A3 SuperPoD.”
Earlier this year, research firm SemiAnalysis pointed out that even though one Ascend chip may be less powerful than Nvidia’s most advanced Blackwell chip, an early look at a Huawei system similar to the one unveiled in Shanghai more than offsets the disparity by piling in five times more chips than Nvidia does in its GB200 computing system. But there’s an efficiency cost as Huawei’s systems require far more power than Nvidia’s to operate, the report said.
Huawei is far from being the only Chinese player in the complex supply chain for advanced chips. For example, semiconductor designer Moore Threads and startup Yunsilicon both had booths at the AI expo center in Shanghai.
Many of the exhibitors from startups to giants such as Tencent and Alibaba showed off AI applications in robotics, smart glasses and translation apps. Overall, there was less talk at the expo about needing Nvidia to power their products.
Internet tech company NetEase’s Youdao business displayed a handheld bar device that uses AI to help students study material including that for college entrance exams.
The device currently uses both AI based in the cloud and “edge” AI that runs on the device, said Gao Huituan, product manager of educational learning hardware at Youdao.
Looking ahead, he said that new AI chips are becoming more power efficient and are able to support different types of products.
While Nvidia’s chips focus more on cloud computing power, “many domestically made, very excellent chip manufacturers are working on some edge devices,” he said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. “Now everyone has relatively good computing power.”
Straddling tech tensions
Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company, riding on the demand for its chips that have been heled drive the latest generative AI breakthroughs.
The company had to stop sales to China in April due to new U.S. restrictions, following tougher export controls over the last three years aimed at reducing China’s AI capabilities and which have prevented Nvidia from selling its most advanced chips to the country. The company tailored the H20 for China, which Huang has said is a $50 billion market.
Tesla, Google, Amazon Web Services and Siemens were among the U.S. and European companies with booths at the AI conference in Shanghai.
Nvidia had a booth in Beijing earlier this month at an annual supply chain conference, which coincided with Huang’s third visit to China this year and news that the U.S. will allow the chipmaker to resume sales of the H20 chips to China.
But the company has not shared when shipments would begin or how many orders it had received from Chinese customers.
“Nvidia is the model in (AI) GPU development for the short to medium term not just because of H20, but also because of flagship products like the GB300,” Phelix Lee, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, said in an emailed statement. “The return of H20 could help Nvidia to remain as the de facto standard in AI datacenter systems, especially when domestic alternatives are lurking.”
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Beijing has been striving to boost tech self-sufficiency as it has faced U.S. restrictions accessing high-end tech. The country over the weekend also took another step toward promoting its AI standards globally.
Chinese Premier Li Qiang announced plans for a global AI cooperation organization during a speech at Saturday’s opening ceremony. The initial headquarters will likely be in Shanghai, state media said.
The plans come just days after U.S. President Donald Trump announced an American action plan for AI that included calls to reduce alleged “woke” bias in AI models and support the deployment of U.S. tech overseas. More
EVER SINCE President Donald Trump unveiled his Liberation Day tariffs in April, the world’s biggest trading relationship had been on the rocks. The European Union swung from trying to sweet-talk America into making a deal, to threatening retaliation. On July 27th dealmaking won out. At his golf course in Scotland the president and Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, unveiled the outline of a preliminary trade agreement. The bloc has pulled off a tricky balancing act: making enough concessions to keep Mr Trump happy, while limiting the economic damage. More
