#56 - Is It You Paying, or Your AI Agent? Samsung Sells Batteries for AI, Huawei Goes Luxury, and Singapore Calls the Robots

Samsung SDI's revenue is up more than 50%, partly thanks to backup batteries for AI data centers, and when AI agents start shopping for you, a merchant needs to know: is this Malcolm paying, or his agent?

Fresh from Shanghai, on Malcolm's first trip to China, with Beijing, Shenzhen and more cities to come, a new city every two or three days.

In this episode:

🔋 Samsung: batteries for AI data centers (00:58) — Samsung SDI reports 52.6% more revenue, and Malcolm says the growth came from batteries for AI data centers rather than for cars. Data centers need backup batteries to bridge power gaps of a few milliseconds, like emergency power in a hospital. About 60 gigawatt-hours of energy storage equals a million car batteries side by side (he is not saying Samsung builds the cars). Then Shanghai: a quiet major road, green license plates, one million charging points, and delivery scooters that swap batteries in seconds. In Malcolm's view, that kind of infrastructure is missing in Europe.

🚗 Huawei: AI computing and a luxury car (06:20) — Huawei is known in the West for phones and mobile networks, but on 28 October it starts a new AI computing service in Wuhan with 1,000 specialized accelerator cards, a kind of pendant to Nvidia. The hard part is making the cards exchange data fast enough, so Huawei builds the connections too. Then the car: Malcolm sits in a Maextro S800, built by JAC with Huawei, feels half Maybach and half Rolls-Royce, and calls it half an AI car. Against that, his VW ID. Buzz: in his words, VW is really bad at building and integrating software.

💳 Tencent and Visa: you or your AI agent? (11:40) — Tencent, the company behind WeChat, and Visa. Malcolm paid a restaurant, a hotel booking and an ice cream with WeChat in the last 24 hours, plus a Photoshopped photo on the Shanghai skyline for about a euro. Visa wants in because agentic payments are next: a merchant needs to know whether Malcolm or his AI agent made the payment, especially in B2B, where accounts payable teams still lose half an hour in supplier portals. He describes Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol as the way to say "this is Malcolm's agent and it may spend up to a set amount", a huge and still untapped market.

🤖 Singapore: a robot challenge with Micron (15:36) — Singapore launched a manufacturing challenge for AI robots on 21 October, partnered with Micron: a robot arm has to service a production chamber, replace a component and close the chamber properly. That can mean a thousand steps for a robot, Malcolm says, like fitting a part while wearing thick ski gloves and opaque glasses. Singapore cares because industry earns one fifth of every dollar there. He closes with his friend in Shanghai, who runs a printed-circuit-board maker heavily invested in robotics, and a thought experiment: bring a Unitree robot into a German factory and the next question is where the data goes.

Corrections to the recording:

• Samsung SDI: The 52.6% is Q3 2026 revenue versus the year-earlier quarter. Samsung names energy storage and backup batteries for AI data centers as a driver, but also cylindrical cells for power tools and EVs. "Not cars, but AI data centers" was too sweeping (Samsung SDI).

• "About 60 gigawatt-hours" are energy-storage orders secured this year overall, not deliveries and not only for AI data centers (Samsung SDI).

• EV share in Shanghai: not 71 or 75%, and not "three out of four". In March 2026, 56.99% of passenger cars sold in Shanghai were fully electric (22,915 of 40,203), so more than every second car (Shanghai city government).

• The comparison is not like for like: Germany 19.1% (Destatis) and Austria 21.3% (Statistik Austria) are full-year 2025 figures for battery-electric new registrations, while Shanghai's is a single month of sales. At the end of 2024, Shanghai had about 980,000 charging points, not quite a million.

• Huawei ADS 4 is a driver-assistance system, not a self-driving car. JAC describes assisted driving and says the S800 has 36 sensors (JAC).

• Porsche and Nvidia is a thought experiment. The actual partners behind the Maextro S800 are JAC and Huawei (JAC).

• The Tesla/Grok and VW comparisons are Malcolm's own experience. What a car's voice assistant can do depends on model, software version and settings; Tesla's Grok launched in Europe in February 2026 with navigation commands in beta (heise).

• Tencent: 1.4 billion is the combined monthly active accounts of Weixin and WeChat (1.439 billion on 30 June 2026), not 1.4 billion distinct people and not a count of people who pay with WeChat (Tencent).

• The Tencent-Visa announcement of 29 October is a memorandum of understanding to explore cross-border payments, remittances and AI-agent shopping, not a launched product. It does not cover B2B invoice payments (Tencent).

• The supplier-portal invoice story belongs to a separate pilot: Visa, BILL and Billtrust announced it on 20 October, with an agent paying already-approved invoices. Tencent is not part of it (Visa).

• Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol lets merchants recognize and verify an AI agent through signed requests. It does not itself set or enforce spending limits such as "$500 a month"; limits and payment authorization are handled separately (Visa).

• Singapore: The challenge is run by the National Robotics Programme, A*STAR and the PINE Lab at NTU, with Micron as title sponsor and first use case; manufacturing is "close to 20 per cent" of Singapore's GDP. The official task has six subtasks, "a thousand steps" was a figure of speech (Minister Gan Siow Huang's speech, National Robotics Programme).

• The Unitree remark is a hypothetical objection, not a finding for every deployment. Security researchers reported in 2025 that Unitree G1 humanoids send telemetry to servers in China; whether and where data flows depends on model, firmware and configuration (Alias Robotics, Help Net Security).

Sources: Samsung SDI (Q3 2026 results), Shanghai city government, Destatis, Statistik Austria, Hubei Provincial Department of Economy and Information Technology, Huawei Cloud, JAC, heise, Tencent (Visa announcement and Q2 2026 results), Visa (BILL/Billtrust pilot, Trusted Agent Protocol), Singapore MTI/METI (speech by Gan Siow Huang), National Robotics Programme, Alias Robotics, Help Net Security.

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