In pre-market trading for U.S. stocks, the storage, semiconductor, and optical communication sectors all fell broadly, with Western Digital down more than 7%.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), U.S. stocks opened: the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.09%, the S&P 500 fell 0.22%, and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.6%. Chip stocks continued their pullback, with SanDisk (SNDK.O) down 6.5%, Western Digital (WDC.O) down 6.7%, and Micron Technology (MU.O) down 6.07%. SpaceX (SPCX.O) slipped 1.7% as it was officially added to the Nasdaq 100 Index today.

According to monitoring by Beating, China’s leading large language model (LLM) firm Zhipu AI is considering developing its own customized inference chips and has begun inquiring about cooperation with local chip design companies. Zhipu AI is currently on the U.S. Entity List, which bars it from purchasing NVIDIA’s advanced chips. As the daily token usage of its open-source model GLM-5.2 on developer platform Vercel surged 27-fold in a week, its computing resource crunch has grown increasingly severe. While Zhipu AI has deployed domestic computing resources from firms like Huawei and completed extensive software adaptation work, to escape supply chain constraints and lower long-term cloud inference costs, the company has chosen to follow the path of developing its own chips, similar to Google’s TPU and OpenAI’s in-house chip initiatives. This in-house chip project remains in the early discussion stage; if it advances smoothly, manufacturing will be handled by a domestic wafer foundry, with the entire process from design to actual tape-out expected to take over two years.

Li Bojie, one of Huawei’s first batch of "Genius Youths", took to social media to complain about his interview experience at DeepSeek, alleging he was accused of cheating during a coding interview and terminated the interview on the spot. This complaint quickly sparked a new controversy, with Du Jun, a former investor and co-founder of Web3 venture capital firm ABCDE, publicly accusing Li of "lacking contractual integrity". Du Jun alleged that Li and his partner Zhuang Siyuan, during the founding of Metagent in 2024, refused to fulfill their contractual obligation to update on financial and business progress after receiving investment from ABCDE, then went missing and absconded. Du Jun said he could accept any project failure, but could not tolerate the fraudulent act of founders absconding with funds. In response, Li stated: "The investment agreement with ABCDE Capital specified an investment of $1.5 million, but only $500,000 was actually received, with the remaining $1 million never disbursed. The company’s cap table still records the firm’s equity stake at the $1.5 million amount. Due to the delayed investment funds, both I and my co-founders voluntarily took pay cuts, and the company faced difficulties in recruitment and R&D. In October 2024, due to personal and family reasons I was unable to leave mainland China, and given the non-compliance of Web3 projects, I resigned from Metagent, a move that was approved by the board of directors. Until my resignation, as CTO and co-founder, I had consistently fulfilled my obligation to disclose the cap table and business status on schedule. In line with the agreement’s non-compete clause, my subsequent startup projects will avoid sectors including Web3, AI infrastructure, and image generation."

Tether announced it will invest $20 million in the strategic growth funding round of Latin American on-chain financial services platform Mercado Bitcoin, to support its expansion in tokenization, payments, credit, capital markets, and regulated digital financial services. Founded in 2013, Mercado Bitcoin originally launched as a digital asset trading platform and has since evolved into a comprehensive on-chain financial platform covering trading infrastructure, tokenized investment products, credit and lending, stablecoin payments, banking infrastructure, and cross-border financial services. The company currently serves 4.5 million users, has issued over R$2 billion in tokenized assets, and holds more than 10 licenses in Brazil and Europe.

According to a report by The Information, Chinese AI firm Zhipu AI is considering developing its own AI chips. Sources familiar with the matter said that driven by rapid growth in demand for its GLM series of open-source AI models, coupled with intensified computing power constraints due to U.S. export controls, Zhipu AI is evaluating self-developed chip solutions. Headquartered in Beijing, Zhipu AI is one of China’s leading AI labs, and its GLM series of open-source models has garnered market attention. Three people directly briefed on the plans said Zhipu AI has recently held initial discussions with some Chinese chip design companies to explore the possibility of co-developing custom AI processors.

EDX Markets has announced the completion of a $76 million Series C funding round, led by SBI Holdings. A digital asset technology firm, EDX Markets operates an infrastructure combining institution-only trading venues with a central clearing platform. The capital will support the company’s continued growth, including expanding its trading, clearing and settlement capabilities, accelerating product development, and scaling its global business. As institutional participation in digital assets continues to rise, EDX aims to meet institutional demand for secure, efficient digital asset trading infrastructure. Earlier this year, EDX launched EDX FlowConnect?, a crypto-as-a-service solution that enables enterprises to securely roll out digital asset trading products for their clients. Most recently, EDX submitted an application to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to establish EDX Trust, a proposed national trust bank that plans to offer regulated digital asset custody, clearing, settlement, and risk management services.