Techmeme

Song Jung-a / Financial Times: The South Korean government, Samsung, and SK hynix plan to invest ~$590B for a new chip complex, including four chipmaking plants and a chip packaging cluster  —  Companies to invest alongside South Korean government in factories to meet surging demand for memory chips

Yi Whan-woo / The Korea Times: South Korea unveils plans for new AI data centers backed by ~$357.5B from SK Group, GS Group, and Naver, targeting 8.4GW initially and 18.4GW by 2035  —  President Lee Jae Myung speaks during a public briefing on the government's three flagship mega projects at Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul, Monday.

Ming-Chi Kuo: Kuo: the memory supply-demand gap will widen through 2027, with an estimated 15%-20% of 2026 consumer electronics capacity shifting to data centers in 2027  —  ▌Start with my latest industry checks: The pressure on Apple has shifted from soaring memory costs to a widening supply gap.

David Keohane / Financial Times: Dealogic: Japan saw 18 IPOs in H1 2026, the lowest since 2011, despite stock market surges, partly due to Japan's lack of AI, data center, and chip startups  —  Tokyo's surging stocks fail to jump-start lacklustre listings market in first half of this year  —  The number of initial public offerings …

Kif Leswing / CNBC: Soaring memory costs are posing existential threats to small electronics makers, amid thin margins, low supply chain leverage, and little room for price hikes  —  Earlier this year, Mono Technologies assembled and shipped nearly 1,000 units of its flagship product, a $600 router development kit.

Ben Jiang / South China Morning Post: DeepSeek details DSpark, a speculative decoding framework for its V4 models, saying it speeds up AI inference by up to 85% and was tested on Gemma and Qwen  —  Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek has rolled out a major upgrade to its flagship V4 model aimed …

Reuters: Shanghai-based Momenta, whose driver-assist tech is used by Toyota, Mercedes, and Audi in China, files for an IPO in Hong Kong, seeking to raise up to $751.1M  —  Chinese self-driving technology firm Momenta Global launched its Hong Kong initial public offering on Monday …

Hassan Mujtaba / Wccftech: Jefferies: memory prices are expected to rise 40-50% in Q3 2026 and 30-40% in Q4, as Chinese memory makers are unlikely to provide meaningful near-term relief  —  Memory prices are all set to rise further in the coming quarters of 2026 as persistent shortages continue to grip the market.

Joshua Brustein / Bloomberg: Humanoid robot maker Apptronik raised ~$1B at a ~$5B valuation, including from Mercedes-Benz, which has a handful of Apptronik's Apollo robots in its factories  —  Jeff Cardenas says bringing humanoid machines into the mainstream will be a gradual process.  —  If you think of an office …

New York Times: Google's Earthquake Alerts system reached 11.4M+ Android users ahead of Venezuela's June 24 earthquakes, providing seconds or up to two minutes of prior notice  —  Jose Flores was driving with his family to see “Toy Story 5” on Wednesday in Caracas, Venezuela, when a loud earthquake alert went off on his wife's Google Android phone.

Marton Eder / Bloomberg: Letter: Austria is pushing the EU to consider hosting Anthropic within its borders, highlighting EU efforts to boost bloc independence from US and Chinese tech  —  Austria is pushing the European Union to consider hosting Anthropic PBC within its borders to counter US efforts to block foreigners …

Zvi Mowshowitz / Don't Worry About the Vase: GPT-5.6 system card indicates Sol is well below the level of most worrisome Mythos use cases, suggesting all GPT-5.6 versions could be released without delay  —  While we wait for a general release, the system card is the best hint as to what is going on with the new candidate for America's Next Top Model, GPT-5.6.

Qianer Liu / The Information: Sources: Baidu's chip unit Kunlunxin Technology plans a Hong Kong IPO at a $50B target valuation, asking investors to buy chips worth 3-7x their IPO investment  —  In China, chip companies may have found a new clientele for their semiconductors: IPO investors.

Jackson Chen / Engadget: Australian government says it plans to double the maximum penalty for any social media company breaking its minimum age law and grant more powers to enforcers  —  The fine can now potentially hit 99 million AUD, or $68 million.  —  After becoming the first in the world to implement …

Bloomberg: Australia-based Firmus partners with Nvidia to build its first data center in Batam, Indonesia; the 360 MW Nvidia DSX AI factory campus is developed with DayOne  —  Firmus Technologies Pty Ltd. will build its first data center project in Indonesia as part of a partnership with US chip giant Nvidia Corp. …

Wall Street Journal: Ajinomoto says it can meet demand through 2030 for ABF, a key material for advanced chipmaking substrates, and plans to expand capacity instead of hiking prices  —  The company is expanding its capacity for Ajinomoto Build-up Film, with production expected to begin in 2032

Shuhei Ochiai / Nikkei Asia: After years of uncertainty, including delayed listings, memory chipmaker Kioxia's shares soared 56x in 18 months, making it Japan's most valuable company  —  TOKYO — Japanese memory maker Kioxia Holdings is now the top Japanese company by market capitalization, capping off a dramatic period …

Andrew Webster / The Verge: As the 2026 FIFA World Cup begins, there is still no clear replacement for “Sports Twitter”, which was a perfect second-screen experience during live events  —  The current landscape of social media networks just isn't the same for big moments like this.

Hyunsoo Rim / Sherwood News: Challenger, Gray & Christmas: out of ~398K US jobs cuts in 2026 through May, employers cited AI as the reason for ~88K of them, up from ~54K in all of 2025  —  Employers cited AI for nearly 40% of May's cuts — a share that's kept climbing since Challenger began tracking it in 2023.

Stevie Bonifield / The Verge: Nothing CEO Carl Pei says memory is now the costliest phone component, accounting for 50%+ of BOM in some models, and predicts phone prices will rise into 2027  —  With RAM getting more expensive, Carl Pei says holiday discounts probably won't be the same this year.