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Chinas

I played China’s ‘anime GTA’ Ananta and I wasn’t surprised to find Spider-Man swinging and Batman punching, but I wasn’t quite ready for the vampire who vomits rainbows

by admin September 27, 2025

I may be outing myself as a dullard, but I don’t think I have a mind that could combine a bunny girl doing odd delivery jobs for cash, a cute Japanese kei truck, and a sick vampire who barfs streams of rainbows into a single scene. Perhaps no single mind could, but that was the moment in Ananta, which has made headlines as “anime GTA” since its re-reveal this week, that really won me over.

Ananta is borrowing—or brazenly copying—a lot, but it might have some wild-ass ideas of its own, too.

The main impression I got from playing about half-an-hour of Ananta at this year’s Tokyo Game Show was: Wow it must have taken a lot of people to make this game! China is on the path to dominate the next decade of triple-A games, and there’s no flashier way to do it than to make (or at least appear to be making) the ur-game. Every mechanic from the top 10 or 20 or 50 most popular games in the world, combined, is surely better than any of those games individually, right?

This maximalist approach to big budget game design has never really been great in practice, and a few minutes into Ananta reveal it is indeed doing things that you have done many times in a game before and probably are not foaming at the mouth to do again:

Punching guys with timing-based combos and counters reminiscent of the Batman Arkham games or Sleeping Dogs
Scripted quick-time events that feel right out of an Uncharted or other 2010s action game
On-rails car chases that give you unlimited ammo to shoot out the tires of your pursuers
Web-swinging around a giant city as Spide—er, the anime version of that guy from Prototype

Ananta | Gameplay Video – YouTube

Watch On

But then there’s the weird stuff—like hopping into the boots of Lykaia, a purple-haired getaway driver slash cop who has a totally different set of play mechanics to the intro protagonist, whose arms get all weird and stretchy to let him swing around.

In its free roam mode, Ananta let me pull up a phone interface to swap between characters, triggering a straight-outta-GTA-5 camera swoop up into the sky and back down into the part of the city where they’re currently hanging out. I only played as Lykaia for a couple minutes before my demo was up, but as a police officer she can scan NPCs against a database, frisk them for weapons, issue citations, and handcuff them, triggering reactions and dialogue you wouldn’t otherwise see.

Will this be fun? Will it produce any actually interesting systemic interactions or are these all paper thin mechanics that you’ll use three times and never see fit to use again? I have no idea, but it sure does seem like a hell of a lot of work if it’s the latter.

You know the saying about Chekhov’s coffin: it better have a vampire in it who’s violently ill and leans over the side of the truck bed to puke a stream of rainbow sick into the night air.

I spent most of the game as Taffy, a bunny girl whose eagerness to make money sees her blindly accepting an odd job from a rando who texts her to meet at a sketchy warehouse. Turns out the warehouse is full of gang members who try to bludgeon her to death with baseball bats. Good thing she has telekinetic powers! I punched out most of the guys before I realized I could psychically rip a bat out of someone’s hands and thonk it into his skull.

Then a delivery driver crashed his truck into the warehouse and told me I needed to get the cargo across town ASAP. Soon-to-be Gen Z icon Taffy cheerily says “Gotta get that bag” as she takes on the job.

It took me a few seconds into the drive to notice that the cargo in the back of the truck was, in fact, a coffin, and you know the saying about Chekhov’s coffin: it better have a vampire in it who’s violently ill and leans over the side of the truck bed to puke a stream of rainbow sick into the night air.

(Image credit: NetEase)

Taffy is less surprised by this than I am. Not in a “she’s used to vampires who throw up rainbows” kind of way, as Ananta does not use this mission to reveal some sort of in-universe lore about a race of vampires suffering some sort of sci-fi gut-melting virus. The vibe I get from Ananta is that none of these characters are going to be very surprised or upset or unduly threatened by anything: they’re all seemingly different strains of jovial bouncy superhero.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure my driving wasn’t the problem: I delivered the vampire to some sort of cult who played him up as a fearsome warrior as a gag before he continued puking into a rusty barrel.

It was just one baffling sidequest out of a game that promises unfathomable scope. I can’t say Ananta’s driving or punching or swinging felt exemplary—but none of them really felt that bad, either! This may be a game that does dozens of things acceptably well. And it made me laugh.

Maybe Ananta’s developers didn’t start from the cynical position of copying the most high-profile games in the world. Maybe they were just brainstorming and someone said yes to every single idea they came up with, even vampires barfing ROYGBIV? It’s done, love it, it’s in the game. Next?

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September 27, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

How China’s Propaganda and Surveillance Systems Really Operate

by admin September 11, 2025

A trove of internal documents leaked from a little-known Chinese company has pulled back the curtain on how digital censorship tools are being marketed and exported globally. Geedge Networks sells what amounts to a commercialized “Great Firewall” to at least four countries, including Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Myanmar. The groundbreaking leak shows in granular detail the capabilities this company has to monitor, intercept, and hack internet traffic. Researchers who examined the files described it as “digital authoritarianism as a service.”

But I want to focus on another thing the documents demonstrate: While people often look at China’s Great Firewall as a single, all-powerful government system unique to China, the actual process of developing and maintaining it works the same way as surveillance technology in the West. Geedge collaborates with academic institutions on research and development, adapts its business strategy to fit different clients’ needs, and even repurposes leftover infrastructure from its competitors. In Pakistan, for example, Geedge landed a contract to work with and later replace gear made by the Canadian company Sandvine, the leaked files show.

Coincidentally, another leak from a different Chinese company published this week reinforces the same point. On Monday, researchers at Vanderbilt University made public a 399-page document from GoLaxy, a Chinese company that uses AI to analyze social media and generate propaganda materials. The leaked documents, which include internal pitch decks, business goals, and meeting notes, may have come from a disgruntled former employee—the last two pages accuse GoLaxy of mistreating workers by underpaying them and mandating long hours. The document had been sitting on the open internet for months before another researcher flagged it to Brett Goldstein, a research professor in the School of Engineering at Vanderbilt.

GoLaxy’s main business is different from Geedge’s: It collects open source information from social media, maps relationships among political figures and news organizations, and pushes targeted narratives online through synthetic social media profiles. In the leaked document, GoLaxy claims to be the “number one brand in intelligence big data analysis” in China, servicing three main customers: the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government, and the Chinese military. The included technology demos focus heavily on geopolitical issues like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and US elections. And unlike Geedge, GoLaxy seems to be targeting only domestic government entities as clients.

But there are also quite a few things that make the two companies comparable, particularly in terms of how their businesses function. Both Geedge and GoLaxy maintain close relationships with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the top government-affiliated research institution in the world, according to the Nature Index. And they both market their services to Chinese provincial-level government agencies, who have localized issues they want to monitor and budgets to spend on surveillance and propaganda tools.

GoLaxy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED. In a previous response to The New York Times, the company denied collecting data targeting US officials and called the outlet’s reporting misinformation. Vanderbilt researchers say they witnessed the company remove pages from its website after the initial reporting.

Closer Than They Seem

In the West, when academic scholars see opportunities to commercialize their cutting-edge research, they often become startup founders or start side businesses. GoLaxy seems to be no exception. Many key researchers at the company, according to the leaked document, still occupy spots at CAS.

But there’s no guarantee that CAS researchers will get government grants—just like a public university professor in the US can’t bet on their startup winning federal contracts. Instead, they need to go after government agencies like any private company would go after clients. One document in the leak shows that GoLaxy assigned sales targets to five employees and was aiming to secure 42 million RMB (about $5.9 million) in contracts with Chinese government agencies in 2020. Another spreadsheet from around 2021 lists the company’s current clients, which include branches of the Chinese military, state security, and provincial police departments, as well as other potential customers it was targeting.

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September 11, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

China’s chip champions ramp up production of AI accelerators at domestic fabs, but HBM and fab production capacity are towering bottlenecks

by admin September 11, 2025

Chinese companies Huawei and Cambrincon have begun to ramp up their production of AI accelerators at China-based fabs, according to J.P. Morgan (via @rwang07) and SemiAnalysis. If everything goes as planned, China will get over a million domestically developed and produced AI accelerators in 2026 from these two companies alone. This will hardly be enough to dethrone Nvidia’s AI GPUs in the People’s Republic, but it will certainly be a major step towards AI self-sufficiency.

However, it remains to be seen whether Chinese industry can produce millions of AI accelerators, as there seem to be two major bottlenecks — advanced semiconductor fab capacity and HBM memory supply. Furthermore, it remains to be seen whether these processors can deliver sufficient performance for China’s AI industry.

No more TSMC for Chinese AI companies (well, almost)

Although it was widely believed that Huawei produced a significant portion of its Ascend 910B accelerators at Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.’s (SMIC) fabs in China, the company actually used shell companies to place orders with TSMC and deceive the world’s largest foundry to make Ascend 910B silicon.

Time for SMIC to step in

While SMIC apparently did not produce AI accelerators for Huawei until fairly recently, the company has been making the company’s HiSilicon Kirin 9000S and similar system-on-chips (SoC) for smartphones. This has not only helped Huawei to return to the market of high-end smartphones without using restricted processors and models from Qualcomm, but also enabled SMIC to polish off its 7nm-class (also known as N+2) fabrication technology. Keeping in mind that Kirin 9000S has a die size of around 107 mm2, whereas the AI accelerator Ascend 910B has a die size of 665 mm2, it makes a lot of sense to pipe clean the node using the former.

(Image credit: SMIC)

Both SemiAnalysis and analyst Lennart Heim estimate that Huawei illicitly acquired approximately 3 million Ascend 910B dies from TSMC in 2024, which would be sufficient to assemble around 1.4 to 1.5 million Ascend 910C neural processing units (NPUs) that use two Ascend 910B dies. 1.5 million Ascend 910C NPUs are sufficient for Huawei to continue equipping its own AI data centers with in-house AI accelerators and potentially supply them to third parties.

SemiAnalysis believes that Huawei would have run out of silicon by now, but its partner SMIC began to ramp up production of Ascend 910B (or whatever it is called) in the third quarter of 2024, gradually increasing output to alleged hundreds of thousands of units in the first half of 2025. That ramp is set to continue, enabling Huawei to build as many as 1.2 million Ascend 910B dies in the fourth quarter of this year, according to SemiAnalysis.

SMIC appears to have made progress with 7nm-class production technologies and can now produce significant volumes of Ascend dies. Analysts estimate that as few as 20,000 wafer starts per month (WSPM) could enable production of several million chips annually. SMIC’s total advanced-node capacity is projected to reach 45,000 wafers per month by the end of 2025, expand to 60,000 by 2026, and 80,000 by 2027.

Of course, SMIC’s 7nm-class yields remain below those of TSMC, especially for large chips like the Ascend NPUs. However, if SMIC allocates 50% of its output for Ascend, even at a below 50% yield, Huawei will get over 5 million Ascend 910B dies in Q4 2026, according to SemiAnalysis. The big question is whether even 2.25 million Ascend 910C processors will be enough to meet AI performance requirements in late 2026.

SMIC has bottlenecks

JP Morgan is a bit more conservative with its predictions about the production of Chinese AI accelerators, saying that Huawei will get 600 – 650 thousand of ‘700 mm2-equivalent’ dies from local producers (which may include SMIC and perhaps Huawei’s own fab, though it is unlikely that this fab is good enough to produce data center-grade chips at this point) this year and 800 – 850 thousand dies in 2026.

We do not know the die size of the Ascend 910B produced at SMIC, but it is likely that it is larger than that of the same processor made at TSMC, likely close to 700 mm2, so JP Morgan’s estimates should be close to the number of actual NPUs that Huawei may get. The analysts also estimate that Cambricon can get 25 – 30 thousand large chips from SMIC this year, 300 – 350 thousand in 2026, and 450 – 480 thousand in 2027. Keep in mind that the current unit estimates reflect wafer-level production after wafer-in.

(Image credit: SMIC)

JP Morgan seems to be quite cautious about SMIC’s output in general. Analysts from the company claim that it takes about six months from wafer start to chip completion, plus two more months for packaging and module assembly, so it essentially takes SMIC eight months to produce an Ascend 910C.

To put it into context, for TSMC’s 7nm-class process nodes (such as N7, N7+, N6), the typical wafer cycle time — from starting wafer to completed processed wafer — ranges between 90 to 100 days, depending on factors like process complexity and customer priority. For CoWoS-S advanced packaging, the lead time is somewhere between 30 and 60 days, depending on complexity.

SMIC’s production cycle at 7nm-class nodes is roughly twice as long as TSMC’s, primarily due to its reliance on DUV-only lithography with heavy multi-patterning. TSMC’s N7 and N7P process technologies also relied on DUV lithography (only N7+ and N6 incorporate EUV, enabling them to simplify critical layers and reduce overall process steps), but their cycle was not that long. Perhaps, SMIC has fewer higher-end Twinscan NXT:1980i or NXT:2000i litho tools than TSMC, which creates a major bottleneck for large chips like the Ascend 910B, or maybe its fab is less efficient (e.g., has slower tools, less automation) in general. It is also unclear whether SMIC has advanced packaging in-house or has to turn to companies like JCET to fully assemble an Ascend 910C module.

If JP Morgan’s assessment is accurate and SMIC/Huawei have major fab bottlenecks for 7nm-class fabrication technology and large chips, then ramping the fab up may be problematic without access to ASML’s fairly advanced scanners like the Twinscan NXT:1980Di (unrestricted for China, restricted for SMIC) or NXT:2000i (a restricted tool for China).

As Huawei clearly knows that SMIC’s capacity may not be enough to satisfy its demands for mobile application processors, CPUs, and AI accelerators, the company is simultaneously investing heavily in its own fabrication facilities. To equip them, it facilitated the creation of SiCarrier, a maker of fab tools with big ambitions, and bought $9 billion worth of fab tools in recent years to install them into fab(s), reverse engineer them, and build at SiCarrier.

If Huawei’s fab project becomes a success, it will not only enable the company’s greater control over its supply chain but will potentially free up SMIC capacity for other Chinese chipmakers such as Cambricon. However, rebuilding the whole wafer fab equipment supply chain may be too hard a task even for a company like Huawei because even to build a sophisticated DUV lithography system, it will need to replicate several industries, not just a tool from ASML or Nikon.

If there were no restrictions on advanced fab tools for China, companies like Huawei and SMIC would likely attempt to address the 7nm and possibly even 5nm and 3nm-class challenges with a brute force approach by simply procuring more tools. However, even if these companies manage to obtain plenty of ASML’s NXT:1980Di for their fabs, they will still have to perfect techniques like self-aligned quadruple patterning (SAQP) and achieve decent yields, which could take years.

HBM bottleneck

But while the lack of advanced fab tools and production capacity for sophisticated nodes is something to be expected from the Chinese semiconductor industry, there is another, less obvious bottleneck for the People’s Republic AI accelerators: HBM memory supply.

SemiAnalysis reports that Huawei’s AI accelerator output could be limited not only by fab capacity, but by a shortage of HBM. The company had built up a large stockpile of HBM stacks — approximately 11.7 million units, with 7 million of those shipped in just one month by Samsung before U.S. export restrictions on HBM2E (and more advanced) were enforced in late 2024. While this stockpile has supported Huawei’s Ascend 910C production so far, it is expected to be depleted by the end of 2025, which will stop production of these NPUs unless new sources are found.

China’s main domestic DRAM supplier, CXMT, is racing to develop its own HBM capacity. The company has benefited from poached engineers, foreign equipment, and government funding, and can now manufacture DDR5 and early-stage HBM products. However, its projected output of ~2.2 million HBM stacks in 2026 will only support around 250,000 to 400,000 Ascend 910C packages, which is considerably less than what Huawei needs. While CXMT is rapidly expanding, including advanced packaging partnerships with JCET, Tongfu Microelectronics, and Xinxin, it still lacks the scale and efficiency of global leaders like Samsung and SK hynix.

As a result, Huawei and other Chinese companies may attempt to smuggle HBM produced by market leaders into the country to keep building their AI processors. However, given this constraint, China’s AI hardware industry may not be able to scale further unless it can overcome the HBM bottleneck.

What about self-sufficiency?

Being unrestricted in terms of access to advanced process technologies and HBM supply, Nvidia can produce millions of high-performance AI processors for China. As long as its products meet U.S. export controls requirements, the company can funnel millions of GPUs — whether these are relatively low-performance H20 or high-performance B30A — to China to meet demands of its partners like Alibaba or ByteDance.

(Image credit: Huawei)

Since both H20 and B30A seem to be cut-down versions of high-end H100 and B300, Nvidia’s supply of such processors could also be limited, as the company would rather sell more full-fat GPUs. On the one hand, this means that China-based customers or Nvidia could acquire additional capacity from cloud service providers. On the other hand, this means that there is unsatisfied demand for AI processors in the People’s Republic, a market that may well be addressed by domestic AI hardware companies.

However, recent rumors suggest that China’s government wants Chinese companies to buy domestic AI hardware to strengthen the domestic industry. If China truly sets the goal for AI hardware self-sufficiency, then it may well use the brute force approach to production of AI hardware — both compute and memory — and make them regardless of yields and cost. However, given uncertainties with advanced fab capacity and HBM supply, this strategy may not work.

Furthermore, there are other obstacles like fragmented ecosystems and ubiquity of Nvidia’s CUDA software stack that may prevent China from becoming self-sufficient in terms of AI hardware and software in the foreseeable future.

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September 11, 2025 0 comments

GameFi Guides

Jack Ma’s Ant Digital Taps Blockchain to Tokenize $8.4B in China’s Energy Assets: Report

by admin September 9, 2025

In brief

Ant Digital linked $8.4B in Chinese energy assets to AntChain, tracking 15M renewable devices.
It raised 300M yuan ($42M) for three clean energy projects via tokenized assets, Bloomberg reported.
Adoption is expected to remain institutional, with offshore listings hinging on regulatory approval, Decrypt was told.

Jack Ma-backed Ant Group’s enterprise arm has reportedly connected over $8.4 billion worth of Chinese energy infrastructure to its blockchain platform, with experts saying early adoption will likely remain institutional rather than draw in retail investors.

Ant Digital Technologies has been monitoring power output and potential outages from wind turbines and solar panels across China, uploading real-time data to its AntChain blockchain platform, according to a Bloomberg report.

The fintech firm has already finished financing for three clean energy projects using tokenized assets, raising approximately 300 million yuan ($42 million) in total.

The company has reportedly been tracking 15 million new energy devices, including wind turbines and solar panels, with plans to potentially list tokens on offshore decentralized exchanges to create more liquidity, though such moves remain subject to regulatory approval.

Musheer Ahmed, Founder & MD of Finstep Asia, told Decrypt that he does not expect significant retail interest in energy infrastructure tokenization in the early stages.

“It tends to be more of an alternative investment, hence we will likely see more professional investors or institutional investors being the ones who show a key interest in these projects,” he said.

“What becomes vital is the use of IOT devices, which can relay the output and information of each device periodically,” Ahmed added.

That data could then be connected to the chain to provide information on how much energy is being generated, as well as a status update on the health of the assets/infrastructure itself, he added.

“Each token acts as the bearer of a pro-rata claim on the asset’s cash flows,” Rishabh Gupta, Director at TD Group, told Decrypt. “As electricity is sold and costs are settled, the net returns are distributed to token holders in line with their fractional stake.”

Gupta described how “each solar panel or turbine acts as a data node, producing meter readings that oracles relay on-chain.”

“A validator set permissioned or open verifies those readings before they are written to the blockchain,” he added. “Once recorded, the data is immutable and transparent, giving auditors, regulators, and investors a clear, tamper-proof view of production and payouts.”

Tokenization projects often face liquidity challenges in the secondary market, Ahmed said.

Still, beyond investment access, tokenization improves project efficiency through “better tracking of data” and enabling “smart contracts for execution of various investment management elements,” he added.

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September 9, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Open hardware dream collapses as Prusa slams China’s subsidies, patents, and aggressive tactics that reshaped 3D printing from an open playground into a corporate battlefield

by admin August 25, 2025

State-backed rivals have made open source 3D printing nearly impossible
Chinese subsidies shift global competition in desktop 3D printer production
Cheap Chinese patents create obstacles far beyond Europe’s market borders

The open source movement in 3D printing once thrived on shared designs, community projects, and collaboration across borders.

However, Josef Prusa, head of Prusa Research, has announced, “open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead.”

The remark stands out because his company long championed open designs, sharing files and innovations with the wider community.

Economic support and patent challenges

Prusa built his early business in a small basement in Prague, packing frames into pizza boxes while relying on contributions from others who shared his philosophy.

What has changed, he now argues, is not consumer demand but the imbalance created when the Chinese government labeled 3D printing a “strategic industry” in 2020.

In his blog post, Prusa cites a study from the Rhodium Group which describes how China backs its firms with grants, subsidies, and easier credit.

This makes it much cheaper to manufacture machines there than in Europe or North America.

The issue grows more complicated when looking at patents. In China, registering a claim costs as little as $125, while challenging one ranges from $12,000 to $75,000.

This gap has encouraged a surge of local filings, often on designs that trace back to open source projects.

Prusa’s earlier machines, such as the Original i3, proudly displayed components from partners like E3D and Noctua, embodying a spirit of community, but were also easy to copy, with entire guides appearing online just months after release.

The newest Prusa printers, including the MK4 and Core ONE, now restrict access to key electronic designs, even while offering STL files for printed parts.

The Nextruder system is fully proprietary, marking a clear retreat from total openness.

Prusa argues Chinese firms are effectively locking down technology the community meant to share – as while a patent in China does not block his company from selling in Europe, it prevents access to the Chinese market.

A bigger risk emerges when agencies like the US Patent Office treat such patents as “prior art,” creating hurdles that are expensive and time-consuming to clear.

Prusa cited the case of the Chinese company, Anycubic, securing a US patent on a multicolor hub that appears similar to the MMU system his company first released in 2016.

Years earlier, Bambu Lab introduced its A1 series, also drawing inspiration from the same concept.

Anycubic now sells the Kobra 3 Combo with this feature, raising questions about how agencies award patents and who holds legitimate claims.

Meanwhile, Bambu Lab faces separate legal battles with Stratasys, the American pioneer whose patents once kept 3D printing confined to costly industrial use.

Declaring the end of open hardware may be dramatic, but the pressures are real.

Between state subsidies, permissive patent rules, and rising disputes, the foundation of open collaboration is eroding.

Via Toms Hardware

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August 25, 2025 0 comments

Chinas

Closer Than They Seem

No more TSMC for Chinese AI companies (well, almost)

Time for SMIC to step in

SMIC has bottlenecks

HBM bottleneck

What about self-sufficiency?

In brief

Daily Debrief Newsletter

Economic support and patent challenges

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