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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Julius Wong who wrote (202187)	10/21/2023 5:46:13 AM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 218397

Re <<wraps>> reuters.com Australia says 'not necessary' to cancel Chinese firm's lease on Darwin port Kirsty Needham October 21, 202312:15 AM GMT+8 Updated 17 hours ago The port in Darwin, northern Australia, April 21, 2017. Picture taken April 21, 2017. REUTERS/Tom Westbrook/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights SYDNEY, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Australia said a security review of a 99-year lease held by Chinese company Landbridge on the northern port of Darwin, a key focus of its defence strategy, found it was "not necessary to vary or cancel the lease". In a statement, the prime minister's department said: "Australians can have confidence that their safety will not be compromised, while ensuring that Australia remains a competitive destination for foreign investment". Advertisement · Scroll to continue It added that monitoring of security arrangements would continue around the northern port, Australia's closest to Asia, where Landbridge operates a commercial wharf and cruise ship terminal. During a diplomatic dispute that is now easing, China had criticised Australia for blocking Chinese investment in infrastructure on national security grounds. The 99-year lease of the commercial port to Landbridge was put under scrutiny in 2021 by the Australian government as it boosted foreign investment screening. After it won election in 2022, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's Labor government launched a second review, involving defence, foreign affairs and security agencies. The announcement the lease would not be varied or cancelled comes ahead of Albanese's visit to Washington next week, and ahead of an expected visit to China this year. The U.S. State Department said it had no comment on the Australian statement. Landbridge won a bidding process in 2015 to operate the port in a deal worth A$506 million ($390 million). The awarding of the contract to Landbridge by the Northern Territory government came just a few years after the United States posted the first of a rotating group of U.S. Marines in Darwin. The size and scope of U.S. military rotations through northern Australia, and the strategic importance of northern bases, has been boosted after an Australian defence review said in April China is undertaking the largest military buildup of any country since the end of World War Two. Peter Dean, director of foreign policy and defence at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, said it was likely the government would seek to build a second port in Darwin harbour or nearby for military use. "Naval assessments have been saying they want a dedicated wharf on their own," he said. Dean, one of the authors of Australia's Defence Strategic Review, said the port leased by Landbridge was physical infrastructure, so didn't pose the same security risk as a power grid or 5G network, areas where China has previously been blocked from investment. "Absolute worst case scenario, you just nationalise it and take it back. We need to find areas where we can collaborate with China," he said. Landbridge and Darwin Port said in a statement the decision "reaffirms our position that there is no basis for security concerns given the Port is operated as a commercial enterprise in accordance with Australian Law and the Port transaction documents". Australia is pushing for China to lift trade blocks on its wine industry ahead of the Albanese visit, with a World Trade Organisation ruling on the dispute imminent. Reporting by Kirsty Needham; additional reporting by David Brunnstrom in Washington; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. Acquire Licensing Rights

To: Julius Wong who wrote (202187)	10/21/2023 7:04:45 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 218397

Team USA clears China market of Team Intel and its chip AI chip, so vacating the China playing field to Team Huawei w/ ready replacement AI chip, saving time and money, the bother of competition, and at the same time weakening global competitor, and also btw handing over the Russia market, for prospective win-win outcome reuters.com Analysis: US chip curbs give Huawei a chance to fill the Nvidia void in China Josh YeOctober 21, 202312:13 AM GMT+8Updated 18 hours ago FILE PHOTO: A logo of Huawei Technologies is seen at its exhibition space, at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France June 15, 2022. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights HONG KONG, Oct 20 (Reuters) - U.S. measures to limit the export of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China may create an opening for Huawei Technologies [RIC:RIC:HWT.UL] to expand in its $7 billion home market as the curbs force Nvidia to retreat, analysts say. While Nvidia (NVDA.O) has historically been the leading provider of AI chips in China with a market share exceeding 90%, Chinese firms including Huawei have been developing their own versions of Nvidia’s best-selling chips, including the A100 and the H100 graphics processing units (GPU). Huawei's Ascend AI chips are comparable to Nvidia's in terms of raw computing power, analysts and some AI firms such as China's iFlyTek (002230.SZ) say, but they still lag behind in performance. Jiang Yifan, chief market analyst at brokerage Guotai Junan Securities, said another key limiting factor for Chinese firms was the reliance of most projects on Nvidia's chips and software ecosystem, but that could change with the U.S. restrictions. "This U.S. move, in my opinion, is actually giving Huawei's Ascend chips a huge gift," Jiang said in a post on his social media Weibo account. This opportunity, however, comes with several challenges. Many cutting edge AI projects are built with CUDA, a popular programming architecture Nvidia has pioneered, which has in turn given rise to a massive global ecosystem that has become capable of training highly sophisticated AI models such as OpenAI's GPT-4. Huawei own version is called CANN, and analysts say it is much more limited in terms of the AI models it is capable of training, meaning that Huawei's chips are far from a plug-and-play substitute for Nvidia. Woz Ahmed, a former chip design executive turned consultant, said that for Huawei to win Chinese clients from Nvidia, it must replicate the ecosystem Nvidia created, including supporting clients to move their data and models to Huawei's own platform. Intellectual property rights are also a problem, as many U.S. firms already hold key patents for GPUs, Ahmed said. "To get something that's in the ballpark, it is 5 or 10 years," he added. Huawei and Nvidia did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment. COMPUTING POWER If Huawei manages to grab Nvidia's market share, it could claim another victory against the United States, which has targeted the firm with export controls since 2019. Huawei rolled out the first Ascend GPUs that year and it is one of a number of products - such as its Harmony operating system - that the company says are entirely homegrown. Over the past year, the telecoms giant has shown signs that it is beating back against the U.S. curbs by unveiling an advanced smartphone chip and making claims of breakthroughs in chip design tools. It has also set its sights on becoming a key provider of computing power for AI, with Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou saying last month that Huawei wanted to build a computing base for China and give the world a "second option", in a veiled reference to dominant provider the United States. Huawei's partners in China so far include iFlyTek, a leading Chinese AI software company which is using the Ascend 910 to train its AI models. IFlyTek was also blacklisted by the United States in 2019. On Thursday, during iFlyTek's earnings call, Senior Vice President Jiang Tao said the Ascend 910B's capabilities were "comparable to Nvidia's A100" and announced that it was developing a general-purpose AI infrastructure in China alongside Huawei. "Our partnership now aims to enable domestically developed LLMs to be built with both homegrown hardware and software technology," Jiang said. Other partners include state-owned software firms Tsinghua Tongfang and Digital China. At a conference in July, Huawei said its AI chips now help power more than 30 large language models (LLM) in China, which is going through a generative AI craze and currently has more than 130 LLMs. Charlie Chai, an analyst with 86Research, said Nvidia's ecosystem dominance was not "an insurmountable obstacle if domestic players are given sufficient time and a big customer base". China's self-sufficiency push, which has been championed by President Xi Jinping, is likely to aid this. "In short, a small disruption to near-term supplies, but a big boost to the long-term self-sufficiency agenda," Chai added. ($1 = $1.0000) Reporting by Josh Ye; Editing by Brenda Goh and Miral Fahmy Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. Acquire Licensing Rights