#48 - A Chip That Isn't Built Yet Moves Billions, and a Police AI Finds Your Home From One Photo

A Chinese company announces progress on a memory chip it can't mass-produce yet – and Korea's two biggest chip makers lose five to six percent in one morning. In Berlin, Germany's digital minister wants to tax AI in the morning and talks about no new taxes by the evening.

Today is one question: how can a plan move more money than a product – and who is checking? Recorded with a deep, cold-ridden voice.

In this episode:

🌑 CXMT shakes the memory trade (01:47) — CXMT (ChangXin Memory Technologies), China's biggest maker of DRAM, the short-term memory every computer and AI server needs, says it has made progress on a denser memory design – by industry estimates 30 to 50 percent more memory in the same space, with server memory planned by the end of 2026. The Seoul Economic Daily reports Samsung fell almost 5 percent and SK hynix almost 6 percent on Tuesday morning; Micron lost almost 4. But the chip isn't in mass production yet – yields, performance and customer certification are unverified.

🌑 Huawei vs Nvidia – the first independent count (05:34) — Huawei's chairman claims its AI chips now outsell Nvidia's in China. The first independent count, by IDC for the first half of 2026 and reported by Reuters, says: not yet. Nvidia leads AI data-centre chips in China with 34 percent, Huawei has 28. But Nvidia's shipments fell 44 percent while Huawei's nearly doubled. US export controls taught Chinese customers to stop depending on Nvidia.

🌑 IMF – AI keeps a war-hit world growing (07:24) — the IMF now expects 3.1 percent world growth in 2026, up from 3.0 in July. Xinhua and Fortune name the reason: the AI build-out is offsetting the energy shock from the war in the Middle East. Only 32 countries now make up 95 percent of world growth, down from 54 in April – mostly those in the AI hardware supply chain, like South Korea and Taiwan. The euro area grows only 1.1 percent. Malcolm's take: this is no longer a tech story, it's a world-growth story.

🌑 Germany's AI tax, on and off in one day (11:38) — Germany's digital minister Karsten Wildberger (CDU) said the "extremely high" revenue from AI must be taxed to pay for retraining, the news agency dpa reports – the first German cabinet minister to suggest an AI revenue tax. The same day he told RTL and ntv: "I want growth through AI and I'm not talking about new taxes." Would you build an AI company in a country that floats a tax on it and steps back the same day?

🌑 A police AI finds your home from one photo (14:57) — 404 Media reports on Raven, a police tool from Graylark Technologies: from a single photo inside a home – no window view, no GPS data – it tries to find the exact address by matching cupboards, tiles, fittings and appliances against images from Airbnb and Zillow. Police in Los Angeles and Miami-Dade bought access; Miami-Dade says it hasn't led to significant breakthroughs. Every photo from your home is now a possible address.

🌑 China's top mathematicians unite behind AI (17:16) — Fields medallist Shing-Tung Yau launched an alliance of nearly a thousand Chinese mathematicians from eight institutions to build a maths AI model and AI research tools. While many Western mathematicians argue whether AI makes them lazy, China is organising its whole maths elite around AI. Who moves faster?

🧵 The thread (19:29) — a chip that isn't built yet moves billions, a world economy that leans on AI money, and a tax that comes and goes in a day. The checkers are arriving – the answers aren't yet.

📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904

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AI Neanderthal — AI news for humans, not robots. Stay curious.