Baidu’s AI chip unit Kunlunxin is planning to go public in Hong Kong at a target valuation of $50 billion, The Information reported on Sunday. In an unusual twist, the company asked prospective IPO investors to also commit to purchasing its semiconductors, according to the report.

Reuters could not independently verify the report. The $50 billion target represents a dramatic increase from the $14.7 billion valuation that the South China Morning Post reported Kunlunxin was seeking as recently as this month, and from the HK$100 billion (roughly $12.8 billion) figure TrendForce cited in May.

The practice of tying chip purchase commitments to IPO allocation, if confirmed, would blur the line between investor and customer in a way that echoes the “circular financing” structures the Bank for International Settlements warned about this weekend. The BIS flagged arrangements where chipmakers take stakes in AI labs that then commit to buying their products, calling the terms “typically poorly disclosed.”

Kunlunxin filed confidentially for a Hong Kong listing in January and is also pursuing a dual listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market. It has appointed CICC, Citic Securities, and Huatai Securities as lead banks. The company was founded in 2012 as Baidu’s in-house chip division and is central to the search giant’s ambition to become a full-stack AI company. Hong Kong has become the primary listing venue for Chinese AI companies, with nearly $44 billion raised in equity capital markets in the first half of 2026, the highest level in five years.

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The listing lands amid a broader AI-driven fundraising boom in the city. CATL completed a multibillion-dollar offering, AI developer Zhipu is preparing another round after going public in January, and optical transceiver maker Zhongji Innolight is also planning a listing. SK Hynix has filed for a US listing that could raise $29 billion.

Kunlunxin has been shifting from an internal Baidu supplier to a third-party chip seller. External customers accounted for over 50% of revenue in 2025, and the company was expected to reach breakeven that year. The BIS warned this weekend that the AI investment boom’s financial structures carry systemic risks, and a chip company asking its IPO investors to also become its customers is precisely the kind of entanglement regulators are flagging.

AI AND ML

Surely, we can have rules that allow us to continue doing what we’re doing

For more than three years now, we’ve been hearing from AI execs who insist that the government regulate their industries … until there’s a chance such oversight could hurt business. OpenAI and Anthropic have led the way with the latter’s CEO, Dario Amodei, calling for “binding regulations” in June 2026, only to push back when his latest models were suspended.  

Now Google, which has also called for AI regulation, would like to clarify its request for government intervention and ask for a “middle way” that’s largely favorable to its interests.

“The debate over AI governance is stuck in a false choice between over-regulation and no regulation,” said Google president Kent Walker in a blog post. “There is a middle way: A pragmatic, evidence-based approach that recognizes the unique challenges and opportunities of both frontier AI and widely-deployed AI applications.”

Walker does not explicitly define “over-regulation,” but presumably we’re talking about the recent ban on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5. 

In Google’s 21-page policy paper “A Pragmatic Approach to AI Governance in America” [PDF], the company argues, “There is a middle path that would balance market-driven innovation and independent oversight: a federally overseen frontier AI regulatory organization (FARO).”

The FARO would be modeled after other notionally independent, industry-funded organizations like the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and the American Medical Association, each of which is overseen by some government commission or agency.

The conceit of a middle path is difficult to reconcile with the past decade of dire warnings about AI from technology leaders. If AI is indeed an existential threat with the capability to do harm, one might expect it to be regulated like lead or asbestos.

Yet here’s Google arguing, “AI platforms should be required to take reasonable measures to feature persistent disclaimers, filter out sexually explicit or romantic content, avoid claims the model is a person (and regularly point out that it’s not), and not promote emotional dependency.”

We’ve seen how well this has worked out on the internet, where Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has immunized platforms that take performative safety measures: we wanted some measure of free speech, but we also got no-fault misinformation and social media incitement as part of the package.

The middle road for AI governance is already here: some acceptable level of chatbot suicide promotion, non-consensual nudification images, copyright surrender, model bias, indemnified errors, and guidance toward harms. Hey, we tried.

It’s not communities banning datacenters, but communities negotiating terms. “The question is not datacenters or no datacenters, but how to build datacenters the right way, responsibly and in partnership with communities,” Google’s paper states.

But already for many communities, it’s not a question but an imperative. If there’s one thing that unites the political spectrum at the moment, it’s opposition to datacenters.

And this middle of the road approach looks more like “just let us have our way” with regard to copyright.

“Using publicly available web data for training models is a transformative, non-expressive use – like an art student taking inspiration from walking through a gallery – that should remain protected under fair use in the U.S. and text-and-data-mining exceptions abroad,” Google’s paper muses.

The courts are still considering claims about AI copyright abuse. But as analogies go, AI for Google is more like an art student who controls the tourist referral market capturing the entirety of the Louvre’s imagery and then selling access to those images – fair, profitable use! – and laundered variations in a way that discourages tourists from visiting the actual Louvre.

And then, noting all the creative types who no longer get hired because AI sells their talent on tap, the art student throws in with a non-profit offering incentives to companies for job retraining programs.

Google is asking for a middle path, but one need only look at the growth in AI lobbying over the past few years – up 340 percent since 2023 – to understand that the AI industry is paying to pave this middle path in a favorable direction. ®

DEEP Robotics built its latest firefighting tool around the X30 quadruped platform and gave it a high-pressure pulse water cannon. The result lets crews attack flames in places too unstable or toxic for people to enter right away. Instead of rolling in with heavy hoses and facing immediate danger, operators stay back and direct precise bursts of water or foam while the robot handles the close work.

Recent demo footage has surfaced, showing the machine moving across an outdoor patio, getting into position, and then releasing a thick cloud of fine suppressant on a small controlled fire. The spray mist spreads quickly and visibly slows the flames without interfering with people close. The same capability applies to larger industrial situations where smoke, heat, and structural dangers make direct human entrance time-consuming and risky.

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The X30 base is already pretty tough when it comes to tackling rough terrain. It can easily ascend industrial stairs with 45-degree slopes, step over obstacles taller than 20 centimeters, and maintain balance on slippery metal grating, loose gravel, wet surfaces, and muddy factory floors. That important because a fire scene may contain collapsed scaffolding, spilled materials, or flooded areas, and this robot is equipped to handle them. The firefighting version carries the additional weight of the cannon system, yet it travels with the same smooth stability.

Even when visibility is reduced to zero, the sensors provide the operator with a pretty clear view. The LiDAR generates 3D maps in real time, while the depth cameras, infrared imaging, and high-resolution vision sensors all work together to allow the robot to navigate, detect heat sources, and avoid new threats as conditions change. Dual-spectrum cameras cut straight through the smoke, and gas detection offers an extra layer of protection against chemical or hazardous-material fires. All data is sent back to the command point via low-latency lines, and in some cases, drones or other robots provide additional viewpoints.

The power comes from batteries that last longer than previous generations, ranging from 2.5 to 4 hours depending on the load and how much it moves. The system has a quick-release feature that allows staff to swap out the pack in seconds without the use of any equipment, allowing them to keep the operation rolling even when one unit is required to remain stationary for an extended period. The entire system has an IP67 classification, so it can withstand dust and a little water spray without shutting down.

The pulse delivery method on the cannon itself represents the most significant departure from traditional firefighting gear. It doesn’t employ a continuous stream that soaks everything in its path; instead, it produces quick, intense bursts or a fine micron-level mist. According to technical specifications, a single liter of water can produce almost 1700 liters of fast-moving pulsed mist. This fine substance absorbs heat quickly, gets between the fire and the oxygen surrounding it, and can penetrate into narrow spaces or around barriers far better than a solid jet. The operator may alter the patterns and angle remotely, allowing them to tailor the spray to the unique situation, whether it’s a wide-area suppression or a targeted hit on a particular hotspot.

The wireless cannon configuration has a range of 60 meters, with some setups providing coverage of up to 120 degrees. This keeps the robot and its operators away from the “death zone,” which is where temperatures and structural collapse hazards are highest. There does appear to be a linked hose option in certain demos, which allows them to maintain a continuous flow from a hydrant or a tender while the robot moves forward. In each case, the goal is to provide effective suppression while keeping the public at a safe distance.

Astronomers just received the largest and sharpest visible-light portrait ever assembled of the Milky Way’s central bulge. The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope produced this six-gigapixel mosaic during a single day of observations in March 2025, packing more than sixty million stars into one frame along with dark dust clouds and pockets where new stars are forming.

The image spans a vast expanse of sky that most space telescopes cannot capture in a single glance. To get the complete image, 9 separate snaps from Euclid’s camera were stitched together, with each section covering more ground than the entire Moon from Earth. The original data was black and white, but colors were added later using similar observations from the Canada France Hawaii Telescope, which greatly improved the identification of different types of stars and gas.

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The middle of the frame is covered in golden yellow stars that are so tightly packed that it resembles a sparkling sprinkle of glitter on sand. The galactic bulge, a massive center structure containing 8 billion stars, is primarily composed of older, colder stars. Bits and pieces of deeper colors and channels cut through everything like black ink blots or wisps of smoke. These are dense clouds of dust and gas soaking up the light from the stars behind them.

As you move up the image, the color palette changes slightly, with the reds and purples becoming more stronger and some dazzling blue lights standing out against a faint red glow. These blue lights are actually young, enormous stars that recently formed in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. Their light ionises the hydrogen gas around them, resulting in the red glow seen in spots. Everything is visible from a distance of approximately 26 000 light years away, and you’d have to go through a lot of intervening material in our galaxy’s disk to see it.

The amount of detail here is incredible, especially given how bright and packed the galactic center is generally, which swamps the detectors with all that brightness and dust, but Euclid’s built-in sharpness allows it to separate individual stars even in the most congested locations. The resolution is equivalent to the Hubble camera, but it can capture 270 times more sky in each frame.

A ground-based telescope like Keck would take a whopping 2,000 hours to cover the same ground with the same level of quality. To be honest, the true value of this shot stems from using it as a baseline for future observations. Astronomers will be able to compare it to later images to discover microlensing events, which occur when the gravity of a foreground star and any planets it may have temporarily increases the light from a background star.

The way this brightens allows you to tell if a planet exists, and repeating the process allows you to compute the planet’s mass. Over the last 20 years, astronomers have discovered over 300 exoplanets near the galactic core. Euclid’s map of the stars presently contains 51 known planets, and it will aid in the finding of many more, as well as determining the masses of planets that have already been detected, such as one icy globe that has been present for the past 20 years.

Ford executives said they have hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them were former employees, while others had been working at suppliers — after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality level.

Bloomberg reports the company’s chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been “relying more and more on automated quality systems” with disappointing results. So the company “brought back technical specialists,” and those specialists “hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”

Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, “Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product.”

To be clear, this doesn’t mean Ford is abandoning its AI plans entirely. Instead, it’s using the rehired employees — referred to as “gray beard” engineers — to train younger staff and reprogram AI tools.

This rehiring seems to be paying off, with Ford anticipating that it will lead to $1 billion in reduced costs this year. The automaker also claimed the top spot among mainstream brands in the JD Power Initial Quality Survey released this week.

science

Remove something from the internet? You can’t stop the (climate change) signal, Mal

It’s back! After Donald Trump shuttered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate.gov website in 2025, cutting off public access to its 15-year archive of climate information, former members of the site’s team have brought much of it back at a new domain.

“Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change,” Climate.us managing director Rebecca Lindsey said of the new platform in a press release.

Lindsey, who previously served as the Climate.gov program manager and lead editor, told The Register in an email that she and one of the web developers responsible for the site were the first to be caught up in government purges when DOGE swept through the department in late February 2025. 

“In May, political appointees directed that all the remaining Climate.gov editorial and GIS/data visualization staff be removed from the contract,” Lindsey added. 

Created in cooperation with sustainability nonprofit accelerator Multiplier, Climate.us aims to be an independent alternative to its old .gov, and many of the former NOAA crew behind the previous website have teamed up for the new initiative to “keep climate information accurate, accessible, scientifically rigorous, and useful for the people who rely on it.” 

Climate.gov, which now redirects to a NOAA page about climate but which hosts none of the data the shuttered site used to contain, was taken offline in July 2025 following a Trump executive order prioritizing “gold standard science.” The order decried what it called the prior administration’s politicization of science by, among other things, “encouraging agencies to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations into all aspects of science planning, execution, and communication.” 

The EO called out climate change science as a particular area of concern, arguing that prior climate science models relied on worst-case scenarios, which somehow meant the public availability of 15 years of climate data and reporting ought to change. 

The shuttering of climate.gov followed a day after the order, leading to scientists expressing concern about the ability of governments, the public, and private organizations to combat the effects of a changing climate, whether the Trump administration believed the data was true or not. 

“This is evidence of serious tampering with the facts and with people’s access to information, and it actually may increase the risk of people being harmed by climate-related impacts,” University of Arizona climate scientist Kathy Jacobs told The Guardian in July 2025, following closure of the site and removal of other climate information from public repositories. 

Changes to the site actually began before that, Lindsey told us. Prior to her termination, the Climate.gov team was ordered to search its archives and remove any information that violated Trump’s Gulf of America order and ban on DEI programs. Guides on teaching climate change and principles of climate literacy were among documents purged from the site in that sweep. 

Climate.us, and Climate.gov before it, are designed to be a bridge between scientists studying the climate and the public, Lindsey told us.

“Most of those functions we can perform almost as well outside of the federal domain as in it,” Lindsey said. “However, losing access to the tremendous store of knowledge and expertise possessed by federal scientists, with whom we partnered to make sure our content was accurate, is a real blow.” 

All of the content that was purged from the .gov is now back, along with blogs from experts, climate status reports, maps and data pathways, and national assessments of climate change as well. 

Lindsey told us that rapidly changing political winds have led her to believe that the government isn’t the right place for that mission to continue, and that she would have concerns about returning the site to federal management if a future administration changed its position on climate change. 

“I believe that fostering climate literacy is a public good, one of those things that benefit society as a whole, rather than one company or person,” the Climate.us director told us. “So I would definitely have concerns that going back to the government would just put us on a hamster wheel, where we’d face the same situation the next politics shift.” 

Regardless of whether that offer comes, Lindsey said that the Climate.us team will continue with the same mission it had before the Trump administration attempted to quash it: Getting climate science in front of the public in a manner that’s understandable so they can make their own decisions about how to respond. 

“We aren’t trying to tell people what to do about climate change,” Lindsey said. “We just think that people will come up with better strategies to confronting the world’s climate challenges if they understand what the science is telling us.” ®