TikTok outage puts new U.S. operations to the test
TikTok is grappling with widespread service disruptions in the U.S. after a severe winter storm knocked out power at an Oracle Corp. data center, testing the resilience of its operations under a new American-owned structure. The technical issues began over the weekend when a power outage triggered “a cascading systems failure,” TikTok USDS Joint Venture LCC said in a statement, adding that users may experience issues like bugs, slower load times, or timed-out requests, including when posting new content.
China’s telecom industry stalls as traditional revenue dries up
China’s telecom industry barely grew in 2025, with revenue expansion stalling as legacy services declined and once-promising digital ventures lost steam. The sector posted revenue of 1.75 trillion yuan ($251 billion) for the year, up just 0.7% from 2024. Traditional services continued to contract. Combined revenue from voice, SMS and mobile data dropped 0.5%. The pivot to new digital services has hit headwinds. Revenue from cloud computing, big data, and other emerging segments reached 450.8 billion yuan, or 25.7% of total sales. But growth fell sharply to 4.7% in 2025 — the lowest in five years and a steep drop from 32.1% in 2022.
Moonshot AI gets more into agents with new model
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Moonshot AI has released an upgraded version of its flagship model Kimi, which it hailed as a multimodal agent model good at handling tasks from coding to essay writing. The open-source model, known as K2.5, can process text, images and videos from a single prompt and handle agentic workflows, where agents make decisions, take actions and coordinate tasks with minimal human intervention.
Iluvatar CoreX challenges Nvidia in three-year development plan
Shanghai Iluvatar CoreX Semiconductor Co. Ltd., a Hong Kong-listed GPU-maker, has announced an aggressive development roadmap for its AI chip architecture, which the company claimed will allow it to rival industry leader Nvidia Corp. in the near future. Under the roadmap, Iluvatar CoreX said that its next-generation AI chip architectures are expected to surpass Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture by 2026, with the ultimate goal of outperforming the U.S. company’s most advanced Rubin architecture by 2027.
Texas doubles down on China tech ban
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has significantly broadened the state’s ban on Chinese technology by adding 26 entities to a list of prohibited vendors for state agencies and employees. The move brings the total number of blacklisted Chinese firms to 50 as Texas intensifies efforts to purge its networks of perceived national security threats.
