Systems

PLUS: Huawei says it’s replaced Moore’s Law; Chinese mobile plans add token allowances; Singtel slinging Optus; And more!

ASIA IN BRIEF Workers at Samsung Electronics may score bonuses of well over $100,000 after calling off a planned strike.

Samsung’s profits recently shot into the stratosphere along with the price of memory and solid-state storage. Staff threatened to strike if the company did not share some of the largesse.

Last-minute talks saw the National Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU) agree not to strike, after Samsung agreed to create a fund that will share profits with workers. A Bloomberg report suggests some workers could be in line for payments of $340,000 under the scheme.

The Union is now running a vote on whether to approve the plan.

Workers appear to have mixed feelings about the plan, as on Sunday the Union published a post in which it tries to justify the settlement as benefiting workers from all divisions of Samsung Electronics, and its plan to create a fund that would see all employees granted around $17,000.

“Your anger must be directed not at us, but at the company,” wrote NSEU Acting Representative Woo Ha-kyung. “It must be directed at the company that is dividing us. I earnestly hope that workers will not thrust arrows of blame and criticism at other workers, but instead unite our strength to move forward.”

Huawei claims it’s leapfrogged Moore’s Law

Huawei on Monday proposed a new scaling law to replace Moore’s Law – which isn’t a law at all and postulates that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years.

Speaking at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2026 International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, the president of Huawei’s semiconductor division He Tingbo proposed the Tau (τ) Scaling Law.

According to Huawei’s announcement, “This law proposes replacing geometric scaling with time (τ) scaling as a new guiding principle for the evolution of both semiconductors and electronic systems.”

This “law” seems to be tangled up with a technology Huawei calls the “LogicFolding architecture” which apparently represents an alternative to traditional semiconductor design by “significantly shortening critical-path wiring, effectively reducing the resistive and capacitive load of signal propagation, and ultimately boosting transistor density and circuit performance.”

Huawei will debut LogicFolding chips later this year and says “By 2031, the high-end chips Huawei designs based on the τ Scaling Law are expected to feature a transistor density that is equivalent to 1.4 nm processes.”

If accurate, that would mean Huawei is five years away from a manufacturing process that will be comparable to the most advanced tech offered by the likes of TSMC and Intel.

Chinese mobile phone plans now come with token allowances

Some mobile phone subscriptions in China now include a quota of tokens to use on AI services.

In the last ten days at least two Chinese telcos – China Telecom and Shanghai Telecom –launched plans that include a token allowance.

State media hailed the plans as representing “a shift in how China’s telecom sector hopes to profit from generative AI, as operators attempt to transform computing power and AI model access into a utility-like service resembling traditional mobile data packages.”

Telcos around the world have historically struggled to create new revenue streams from technology innovations – Google, Meta, and Apple have scooped most of the profits flowing from mass adoption of smartphones, leaving carriers to operate low-margin connectivity services.

APAC bit barn boom peaks in Australia, Malaysia

Commercial real estate outfit CBRE last week reported that datacenter investment in the Asia Pacific region hit a record US$11.6 billion in 2025, much of it going on neoclouds.

“For neocloud providers, access to power is increasingly outweighing traditional location advantages,” said Matt Madden, CBRE’s senior managing director for data center solutions in the region. “This is directing demand toward markets that can support high-density campuses at scale, particularly across India, Malaysia, and parts of Southeast Asia.”

Malaysia’s Johor saw a 53 percent year-on-year increase in live capacity last year, ahead of 37 percent growth in the Australian city of Melbourne.

“This underscores strong expansion momentum outside mature markets such as Singapore and Hong Kong SAR, with around 6-8 percent growth,” CBRE said.

$11.5 billion is a tiny fraction of the giant sums Big Tech is spending on datacenters and infrastructure. Last year we spotted $142 billion of spending in Q3 alone. The world’s most populous region clearly isn’t getting much of that.

In related news, IBM Cloud last week flicked the switch on a new region in the Indian city of Mumbai.

Singtel ready to sling Optus

Singtel last week published a filing [PDF] that declares it is open to offloading a substantial stake in its Australian telco operation, Optus.

Readers may recall that Optus has a long history of trouble, including failing to notice a breakdown of its emergency calling service that is thought to have cost at least two lives, a massive outage, and a major data breach.

Singtel hopes to court “potential Australian partners that align with its objectives of ensuring that Optus continues to be a strong alternative operator in the industry, providing a reliable and trusted critical service to all Australians. Singtel contemplates a like-minded long-term local partner owning a meaningful minority stake in Optus.” ®

Ferrari has officially entered the electric era with the unveiling of the all-new Ferrari Luce, the first fully electric production car in the company’s history. Revealed in Rome, the Luce marks one of the biggest shifts the Maranello-based automaker has made since the company was founded in 1939.

For years, Ferrari resisted going fully electric. The company repeatedly argued that emotion, sound, and driver engagement were core to the Ferrari experience, something enthusiasts believed could not exist without a combustion engine. Even when rivals like Porsche launched EVs such as the Porsche Taycan and brands like Lamborghini began discussing electrification strategies, Ferrari largely stayed focused on hybrids and traditional performance cars.

That changed as emissions regulations tightened globally and EV technology matured enough to support the kind of performance Ferrari customers expect. Ferrari first outlined its “multi-energy strategy” in 2022, confirming electrification would become part of the brand’s future without replacing combustion engines entirely.

The result is the Ferrari Luce, a car Ferrari says is not simply “an electric Ferrari,” but an entirely new type of Ferrari built around an all-electric architecture. The company worked alongside the design collective LoveFrom, led by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and designer Marc Newson, to create the car’s unusually minimalist design language.

And that design is already proving divisive

Unlike Ferrari’s traditionally aggressive and sculpted supercars, the Luce adopts a much smoother, cleaner appearance dominated by a massive glasshouse design and floating aerodynamic wings. Ferrari describes it as “shell-like,” while critics online have compared it to a futuristic crossover more than a traditional Ferrari.

The proportions are also different from what many expect from the brand. The Luce is Ferrari’s second four-door model and its first with five seats. It rides on enormous 23-inch front and 24-inch rear wheels, making it one of the largest road-going Ferraris ever built.

Underneath the controversial styling is an extremely ambitious EV platform. The Ferrari Luce uses four independent electric motors – one for each wheel – producing a combined 1,050 horsepower (772kW). Ferrari claims a 0-100km/h sprint in just 2.5 seconds, 0-200km/h in 6.8 seconds, and a top speed exceeding 310km/h.

Power comes from a large 122kWh battery pack developed in-house at Maranello using 800V architecture. Ferrari says the car supports charging speeds up to 350kW and can recover around 70kWh of charge in 20 minutes under ideal conditions. The estimated driving range is over 530km.

The Luce also introduces several technologies never before seen on a Ferrari road car. These include active aerodynamic grilles, four-wheel independent torque vectoring, active suspension derived from the Ferrari F80 hypercar, and Ferrari’s new “Torque Shift Engagement” system, which attempts to recreate progressive acceleration feel through paddle-controlled torque delivery.

Ferrari says it achieves the lowest drag coefficient ever seen on one of its road cars thanks to its smooth bodywork, active aerodynamic grilles, and adaptive ride height system that lowers the front by 10mm at higher speeds.

So, what’s up with the Luce – is it worth the hype?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ferrari has also spent considerable effort trying to address the emotional side of EV driving. Instead of fake engine sounds, the Luce uses accelerometers mounted inside the drivetrain to capture real vibrations and mechanical frequencies from the electric motors. Ferrari then amplifies and refines those sounds both inside and outside the vehicle to create what it calls an “authentic and functional” soundtrack.

Inside, the Luce looks more like futuristic consumer electronics than a traditional sports car. The cabin features OLED displays developed with Samsung Display, a rotating center control panel, extensive use of recycled aluminum and glass, and a 21-speaker 3,000W audio system.

The EV platform also enables a lower centre of gravity and improved weight distribution for sharper handling. Ferrari’s new Vehicle Control Unit manages power delivery and dynamics in real time, while the brand’s first electric all-wheel-drive system uses advanced torque vectoring for better responsiveness.

Whether Ferrari enthusiasts fully embrace the Luce remains uncertain. But one thing is clear: Ferrari is no longer treating electrification as a side experiment. The Luce represents the company’s clearest acknowledgment yet that the future of high-performance cars will include EVs — even if that future looks very different from Ferrari’s past.

The tech giant claims it can reach cutting-edge chip density by 2031, closing the gap with TSMC.

Huawei has proposed a new guiding principle for the semiconductor industry that it says could allow it to design chips rivalling the world’s most advanced processes, without needing the cutting-edge manufacturing equipment it has been denied under US sanctions.

At the 2026 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) in Shanghai today (25 May), He Tingbo, president of Huawei’s semiconductor business and chair of its Scientist Committee, delivered a keynote speech entitled ‘New Semiconductor Path in Practice’, in which she presented what the company calls the ‘Tau Scaling Law’.

The law proposes replacing geometric scaling, the decades-old practice of physically shrinking transistors, with time scaling as the new guiding principle for semiconductor evolution. The idea is to reduce the time it takes for signals to propagate through chips and computing systems rather than making individual components smaller.

The principle has already acquired a nickname: “Her’s Law”, according to the South China Morning Post – a play on both He Tingbo’s surname and the tradition of naming foundational scientific laws after their originators, as with Moore’s Law.

The approach relies heavily on a technology Huawei calls LogicFolding. By breaking down the physical boundaries of traditional circuit layouts and significantly shortening critical-path wiring, LogicFolding aims to reduce resistive and capacitive load on signal propagation, ultimately boosting transistor density and circuit performance.

The ambitious production target puts Huawei in direct competition with the world’s leading chipmakers. According to Bloomberg, there is currently around a five-year gap between what TSMC can produce and what Huawei, working with its manufacturing partner SMIC, is capable of.

TSMC, the world’s largest producer of advanced chips, currently uses 2nm manufacturing technology and plans to introduce a 1.4nm process for mass production in 2028. Huawei says it will reach that same 1.4nm equivalence by 2031, although it did not provide independent data to support its claims.

Huawei says the framework is already in production. Over the past six years, it has designed and mass-produced 381 chips based on the Tau Scaling Law, for industries from smartphones to AI computing, it says. The Kirin chips scheduled to launch in autumn 2026 will be the first to adopt the LogicFolding architecture.

“We believe that openness and collaboration are key to driving ongoing progress in the semiconductor industry,” He Tingbo said. “No single company can independently find all the answers along the path of semiconductor evolution.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently told CNBC the company had “largely conceded” China’s AI chip market to Huawei.

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The company said its next-gen chips will be “feasible and affordable.”

The emergence of Anthropic’s Mythos has sparked wide-ranging concern about potential threats posed by it and other similar AI models.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is to urge quicker action on improving the IT security of lending organisations amid evolving AI threats when it summons representatives to a meeting tomorrow (26 May), according to the Financial Times (FT).

“This is something that is game-changing. We want banks to look into this seriously. The clock is ticking,” Frank Elderson, vice-chair of the ECB supervisory board that oversees banks, told the FT.

The emergence in April of Anthropic’s Mythos AI model, with its reported high levels of capability in finding and exploiting cybersecurity weaknesses in browsers and operating systems, has sparked wide-ranging concern about potential threats posed by it and other similar models.

“There is a whole range of issues on cybersecurity that we have been engaging on with the banks for years which are all still valid, but given the progress in AI, they need to be dealt with faster,” Elderson told the FT.

US banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley have been allowed controlled preview access to Mythos, and according to the FT, the ECB hopes for collaboration between US and European lenders on the issue.

Although restricted by a current lack of access to Mythos, European banks still need to be prepared for the threats it, and others, could pose, Elderson told the publication.

“The fact that you don’t have access to this model is not an excuse for inaction,” he said. “Malicious actors might have access to this technology soon.”

Last month, it was reported that a private Discord group had gained unauthorised access to Mythos soon after its launch, although had not used it for malicious purposes.

Meanwhile, a new survey of compliance professionals in Ireland has found that more than one-third of participants believe AI is making it more challenging for financial institutions to safeguard customer and other sensitive data, while just 7pc feel it has made data protection easier.

The study by the Compliance Institute, Ireland’s professional body for compliance practitioners, gathered responses from approximately 150 compliance professionals working primarily across Irish financial services organisations to explore views on the impact of AI on data protection, as well as the steps companies are taking to comply with new EU rules which require them to ensure that staff have an appropriate level of AI literacy.

Michael Kavanagh, CEO of the Compliance Institute, said: “AI is increasingly being used in day-to-day operations across the sector, and that is changing how organisations think about governance, oversight and capability.

“What the results really show is a period of adjustment, where firms are actively building and strengthening the frameworks needed to support the safe and effective use of these technologies alongside their existing regulatory responsibilities.”

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Our first look at the entire luxury EV designed by LoveFrom.

A distinctive shape

Not yet functional

Where it counts

Ferrari

Power and control

Sound design

Ferrari

The EU imposed the share sale as part of antitrust remedies in order to approve Prosus’ acquisition of Just Eat Takeaway.

Tech investor Prosus has asked the European Union to not force it to sell off Delivery Hero shares, as Uber eyes an acquisition of the German food delivery group, Bloomberg reported, citing sources close to the matter.

The European Commission imposed the share sale as part of a series of antitrust remedies in order to approve Prosus’ €4.1bn acquisition of Just Eat Takeaway in August 2025.

The EU was concerned that Prosus’ near 30pc stake in Delivery Hero – a Just Eat Takeaway competitor – would cause less competition and a higher likelihood of coordination between the two companies, which could lead to higher prices for consumers.

Naspers, Prosus’ parent company, had agreed to reduce its shareholding in Delivery Hero to a “single digit percentage” by August this year.

The company also committed not to exercise the voting rights it has with its remaining shares in the company and to not increase its equity in the company above a certain threshold for a “specified considerable time”.

Currently, Prosus holds around 17pc of Delivery Hero, with other shares held by a number of large investors.

Prosus, however, does not want to sell its stake in Delivery Hero as Uber continues to eye the food delivery group for acquisition.

The ride hailing giant is reportedly considering upping its bid to purchase Delivery Hero, after an offer – which would have valued the company at more than €11.5bn – was rejected.

Last week, Delivery Hero said that Uber made an offer to purchase the company at €33 per share.

Meanwhile, sources told the Financial Times that Uber approached one of Delivery Hero’s largest shareholders with an offer of €38 per share. Both of the offers were rebuffed.

Delivery Hero shares went up by more than 12pc today to nearly €38 per share.

Last year, the EU fined Delivery Hero and Spanish delivery start-up Glovo €329m for participating in a “cartel” in the online food delivery sector for exchanging commercially sensitive information and allocating geographic markets.

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The OnCampus program, administered by IEEE Educational Activities, last year expanded its engineering experiences from two to seven universities.

Part of TryEngineering, the program is held at universities around the world, offering preuniversity students hands-on opportunities to solve engineering problems.

The IEEE Innovation Committee provided funding for the additional locations.

New participating institutions

The electrical engineering and computing faculty at the University of Zagreb, in Croatia, hosted a two-day program in June. Twenty-five children ages 10 to 14 participated in lectures and workshops on artificial intelligence, computer science, robotics, and astronomy. Tomislav Jagušt, an IEEE senior member and the chair of the IEEE preuniversity coordinating committee, led the program.

In September the Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport’s engineering college held a two-day session at its Abu Kir, Egypt, campus. Fifty students participated in hands-on activities on Ohm’s law, radio communications, and circuit building. They also learned from professors about engineering careers and job opportunities.

Also in September, the Majan University College, in Muscat, Oman, hosted 40 high school students who competed in six challenges to design and build circuits. These include an IoT design and an LED brightness control using a potentiometer, a three-terminal, manually adjustable resistor that functions as a variable voltage divider.

The program also highlighted AI and quantum computing technologies and introduced students to job opportunities in the fields.

The workshop transformed curiosity into creation, empowering students with technical skills and confidence in emerging technologies.

In November at the Universiti Malaysia Perlis, in Arau, 50 students explored the fundamentals of quantum computational intelligence and AI through hands-on activities and interactive simulations. IEEE Senior Member Mohd Hafiz Ismail, a professor of electronic engineering and technology, gave an introduction about quantum computing intelligence technology.

The Hellenic Robotics Center of Excellence at the National Technical University of Athens hosted a two-day session in December. Twenty-five students explored robotics and AI through hands-on design challenges such as TryEngineering’s AI and machine learning methods. They also toured the university’s research facilities.

Hong Kong and Greek universities participate again

The City University and St. Francis University in Hong Kong, and the University of Ioannina, Arta campus, Greece, participated in the program for a second year.

Under the leadership of IEEE Senior Member Paulina Chan and volunteers from the IEEE Hong Kong Section, the City and St. Francis universities jointly held the program in July. They welcomed 55 students ages 12 to 18 from 41 schools.

The students attended tutorials on foundational concepts and theories of AI. They worked in small teams on projects using AI-generated images, voice, and music manipulations. They were coached by students from St. Francis and Imperial College London. The participants presented their projects to judges, teachers, and parents.

The students also visited a nearby semiconductor equipment manufacturer to learn about technology careers from engineers working there.

The results of a post-program survey showed strong satisfaction with OnCampus, with nearly 75 percent of participants giving it a rating of 4 or higher out of 5.

“I enjoyed getting to know about deep learning and its application,” one student participant said. “The content of the activity matched my interest, and I gained new knowledge.”

“OnCampus is led by a strong team with lots of experts in the field,” another said. “It’s a rare chance for students to use software, learn about the theory behind how deep learning works, and get a glance at future possibilities.”

The University of Ioannina hosted the program in Arta in July with support from IEEE Senior Member Stamatis Dragoumanos and IEEE members Nikos Giannakeas and Eleftheria Kallinikou. Nearly 50 students, ages 12 to 16, attended the seven-day event, supported by 17 instructors and six volunteers from the university’s IEEE student branch.

The students learned about AI, augmented reality, microchip design, microcontrollers, and 3D printing. They also attended presentations by engineers from the industry. To give the students exposure to real-world engineering, they visited two hydroelectric power plants and a green data center.

At the end of the program, students presented their projects and showcased the technical skills they had developed.

Those involved in the TryEngineering OnCampus program are proud of the impactful experiences students have gained. The opportunities are possible because universities open their doors, share their expertise, and invest in the next generation of innovators.

The University of Zagreb, the Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport, the Majan University College, and The City University and St. Francis University will be participating again this year.

To learn how you can bring the OnCampus program to your educational institution, send a request to tryengineering@ieee.org.