It's official. Apple Intelligence in China will use Qwen family of models & likely Alibaba Cloud infrastructure. Qwen is already integrated w/ Apple on a system level allowing for 'Compose with Qwen' & other functionalities.

I just recorded this quick take bc I do have a lot to say about the current state of AI industry. Huge crash the last wk. Let's see how bad things get. Overall economic pressure from high interest rates & energy px on AI + deepseek 1017

So, CXMT just started mass production of G5 platform (~D1b to D1c in bit-density) & it has already completed G6 engineering samples validation. This is quite fast. Looks like we might see 4F process enter mass production next yr.

Clearly, leaving 2 carriers in Persian Gulf region is very taxing on a military. It's not just the opex, but the abuse on the naval platforms & airwing that significantly reduces their service life. We saw this w/ GWOT. Big problem is all this effort hasn't solved the issue! we still get massive level of tanker destruction (in spite of Gulf bribery & willingness to tolerate higher transit cost) which will lead to tanker shortage that lasts for a while. Even if we get to 100 VLCC construction in a year, we cannot come close to making up for losing 2 to 4 tankers/day. So, the solution can only be going all in or get out of there. Staying at a holding pattern is not sustainable. Long drawn out w/ 2 to 3 carriers in Gulf region will destroy US military readiness for man yrs.

China's AI Cloud service mkt according to Sullivan. Alibaba Cloud leads w/ 42%. Ali here didn't show the other top competition, but I assume ByteDance/Volcano Engine, Tencent, HW & Baidu are other top ones.

Top auto import into China thru September. Lexus is far & away the top brand. Lexus ES, RX & NX are 3 of the top 4 models to be imported. China has imported > 100k Lexus, >56k Benz & ~32k BMW + ~20k of Landrover & Porsche each so far. Most of Benz & BMW sales in China are local production

CNNC Q3 report show it currently has 27 NPP in operation for 26.21GW & generating 153 TWh in power thru 3 quarters It also has 11GW wind & 24.7GW solar installed & 2.06GW in BESS, generating 33 TWh It got 4 more NPP approved on 7/31 + 2 more on 9/9. It has 22 under construction 25.63GW. It's always interesting for me to see that while China's nuclear energy company's main business lives in NPPs, they also diversify into new energy sources which get built faster.

Despite seeing its revenue grow by 10% YoY in Q3 & net profit grow by 24%, Geely CEO says the past months have been the most fiercely competitive period for Geely Auto in past 2 yrs. Looking @ its sales, its high margin Zeekr 9X sales are clearly down while Xingyue is up. More importantly, Geely likely sees the torrent of new models hitting its most profitable & successful segment.

Big news for PLAN as its flywing UCAV GJ-21 flew off & landed on the first Type 076 LHD Sichuan for the 1st time. Type 076 is designed w/ both helicopters & catapult launched UCAVs in mind.

More BYD news: FangChengBao Tai-7 reached 300k in sales. The fastest ever medium to large SUV to reach this mark. Hugely popular in China. BYD 3rd Generation Tang EV is getting its interior revealed. Expects to be launched in Q4. Chinese mkt really has moved to medium & large SUV in the recent yrs. BYD is following that trend by putting most of the efforts on this segment.

I've done it, my interactive map of front line PLA fighter jet bases. This one has J-20, J-15/16 & J-35 units labeled. I also have bombers, transport & special missions aircraft added in. Again w/ DeepSeek help here.

Based on the amount of tokens I'm burning, I don't think I can afford to use DSV4.1 Pro, but I will definitely try it out. Zai really needs to step up w/ their next release, bc if 4.1 Pro actually turns out to be good, GLM-5.5 will need to be a huge jump over 5.3.

FYI, to achieve this blessed 3.4% real GDP growth right before the midterms, the BLS had to subtract its own estimate of inflation (the GDP Price Deflator), which it pegged at just a 2.2% annualized rate. LOL. What a complete farce.

Is Wall Street realizing that the AI build out is not only bad for the finances of Mag 7 but also wipes out other SV software companies that had moats & huge margins before this? Don’t worry, we have this new low margin ai cloud business replacing that high margin ads business model you had!

Great chart of BYD quarterly result H/T 港漂侃电车出海 BYD gross margin has been around 18% all yr & net margin of 4.6% is the highest since 2025Q1. BYDE continues to vastly underperform rest of BYD group, so the auto/battery division gross margin is 21.5%. Quite good. Among vehicle sales mix, we see significantly higher sales in FCB brand & increase in Denza. Ocean/dynasty family is flat YoY. Export was 42% of total sales in Q3. It has been > 40% all yr.

China's new energy export in the past few yrs: Notice battery has replaced solar as the largest valu exporting item while solar export continues to get smaller as % of overall clean energy export. I have also have a chart showing the countries where importing Chinese clean energy is the largest % of their GDP

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China is finally allowing gasoline & diesel pricing to be raised by 345 & 335 RMB/t (still subsidized vs where they should be based on mkt px). Domestic inflation concerns vs NEV growth Most vehicles on the road in China are still ICE

BYD performance has rebounded based on its Q3 earnings results: Q3 revenue reached 221.5B RMB +13.59% YoY w/ 10B net profit +28% YoY So far in 2026, revenue flat @ 566.3B RMB & 22.3B net profit -4% YoY Yes, it did suffer competitively for a while but has now recovered after deployment of new Blade 2.0 & Flash Charging models & network. Local factories in Thailand, Brazil, and Hungary are coming online & raising production levels.