Every country should strive for energy independence & not depend on hydrocarbon powers.

Reminder that China is world's 4th largest NG producer & has world's largest shale reserves. Production cost of shale is 20% cheaper than pipeline gas.

China doesn't need Russian oil/gas.

https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/2020432259724058940

China also does not depend on Russian pipeline since it gets more gas that way thru Central Asian republics + 12 bcm from Myanmar.

China's increased NG production means it has reached 61% self sufficiency while LNG demand has collapsed. Pipeline import increased due to lower px.

MIIT filings had some interesting new EVs:
1st, we have Tang 9 EV here
Comes in AWD 215+370kW or 300/370 RWD
240 to 250 km/h top speed!
4.9s from 0 to 100
Dimension 5263/1999/1790mm wheelbase 3130, seats 7
BYD going full electric on full sized SUV is big deal
-> battery energy density/cost & charging speed are now good enough to allow for this
BYD used to only do PHEVs for large SUVs. Next is BEV version of the popular Tai-7 Box SUV.
Dimension 5050/1995/1865mm wheelbase 2920
Comes in AWD 215+300 kW or RWD 300 kW

Another medium-large SUV getting BEV version.
Sign of maturing super ePlatform & battery tech.

China's import, export, consumption & production data of Gold from 2025.

932.5t imported in 2025, down 448t YoY, but import bill of 726B RMB was just 0.6% behind 2024.

In fact, Gold was the 4th largest import item in 2025 behind Semi, Oil & Iron Ore.

Gold import masked the size of China's trade surplus in 2025, imagine that. Even w/ China settling some surpluses thru gold, it still ran a $1.2T surplus. This happened while Gold was the largest export item out of America in Oct & Nov, even more than aircraft & oil.

Picture of America sending gold bars to China while getting $ back has never been so accurate.

Much underappreciated in China's energy transition/security drive is its NG plan.

Deep concerted effort in both driving up domestic production & pipeline import to lower import of expensive & geopolitically risky LNG.

Self sufficiency rate now above 60% while pipeline may have surpassed LNG in tonnage this yr.

https://x.com/tphuang/status/2017631911989154195

Important pts from Nikkei article below:
Domestic shale is 50% than imported LNG & 20% cheaper than even Russians pipeline gas.

LNG import fell 11% to 68.43mt, while pipeline has increased -> led to import bill dropping by 12.5% in $ amt, even tho qty just dropped by 2.8%

CCTV reports on exploding order backlog for UHV large capacity transformers from domestic & foreign customers, including North American ones, especially from AI customers.

There are ~3000 transformer companies in China, mostly in Guangdong & Jiangsu. 60% of global capacity.

A Jiangsu factory has order book for until until of 2027. China's domestic transformer mkt grew by > 20% YoY w/ AI computing & UHV transformer orders growing 35% YoY.

Delivery time for US mkt has grown from 50 to 127 wk.
EDWC project is generating huge domestic demand.

My thread on China's silver trade & what's happened in the past 2 months has silver px skyrocketed in China.

1st, Silver has huge & growing industrial demand, especially in the age of PVs, EVs & AI. Consumer demand is sky-rocketing in China -> Why China put in export controls.
75% of silver is by product of mining other metals, which can be separated & processed into Silver concentrate b4 being smelt & refined to 99.99% grade

China produced 3300t of silver concentrate in 2024, just 13% of global production, so it has to import massive amount of Ag to feed smelters. Not so different from other metals.

It’s unclear to me how stringent this will be enforced since Japan is a major intermediate player in supply chain. Does this mean Ga won’t be exported to Japan?

This could affect far more than just Japan. Also, is China ready for possible Japanese retaliation? Dual-use list can be found here
Includes Ga, Ge, Sb, Scandium, yttrium, Lutetium, dysprosium, terbium, gadolinium, samarium & whole bunch of chemicals.
+ upstream material like UHMWPE, graphite, high end Al/Ti alloy, complex fibersxkzj.mofcom.gov.cn/tzgg/art/2026/…

CXMT has filed updated 2025 guidance as part of its IPO filings. It had generated revenues of 8.3B, 9.1B, 15.4B RMB from 2022-2024 & 24.2B in 2025H1.

Now, it expects 55-58B for 2025 & turning profit for the 1st time.
Likely up to $3B in rev in Q4, making it bigger than SMIC. CXMT has 3 12-inch fabs (~20k wpm each) in Hefei & Beijing. It plans to raise 29.5B RMB off IPO out of 34.5B it needs for DRAM tech upgrade, production line upgrade & R&D.

CXMT invested 15.2B in R&D from 2022-2024, 36.6% of its revenue. It seeks to keep that at ~30% going fwd.

ByteDance's Doubao/Seed team has unveiled Seed1.8.
While it is a huge improvement over 1.5, it does noticeably trail Gemini-3 & GPT-5 on most of the LLM benchmarks.

They do seem to focus on Search & "Economically Valuable Fields", where they are SOTA based on benchmarks.


Among other benchmarks, they do quite well on the Visual & Video generation as well as VLM (not a surprise if you've seen their rankings on artificial analysis for this), but not so competitive on coding.

-> Their unique data set from apps are a huge advantage in video & visual

As Gemini caught up to GPT, Google AI Ecosystem is getting a huge boost. What if as Marc says, AI is commodified? As in, OpenAI cannot maintain indefinite lead & command high premium vs Google & Anthropic?

Google can undercut OpenAI/Anthropic until those 2 go out of business.
Using IBM chief Krishna's comment, each GW of DC cost $80B, which means 100GW of DC requires $8T of capex + opex (like electricity cost, taxes & staff) + interest. Interest alone is $800B
5 yr cycle -> $1.6T depreciation/yr.
+ opex & engineers -> over $3T in cost per yr for AI.

As expected, US's latest National Security Strategy doc embraces old model & rejects new model. We already know about China's dominance in the "New 3" (EVs, Solar & Batteries), but 15th FYP show China's full embrace of Hydrogen & Biomanufacturing. How new replaces the old model.

https://twitter.com/ruima/status/1997793877689053359

China is seeing rapidly declining demand for diesel & gas. Diesel HDT ratio has shrunk to 40% recently as EVs & LNG ones exploded. In pax vehicle mkt, NEV penetration is also at 60% for Nov.

Effect on WTI px, Permian rigs & US mfg is for all to see

https://x.com/tphuang/status/1992750250738516064

Welcome to the "Doubao Phone" - Collaboration bw ByteDance & Nubia/ZTE which uses a new BD OS.

Already hailed by some as the 1st real AI-centric phone. Everything here tied to Douyin account & Doubao AI features. AI Agent simply listens to your command & carries out the task Alibaba's great competition to this is its new Quark AI phone which uses Qwen.

In this world, Android becomes less important & the foundational AI model becomes the OS driving everyone.

https://x.com/AlibabaGroup/status/1996129986902983141

Just how large is China's compute & overall AI infrastructure? A good place to start is just by looking at Doubao/ByteDance numbers, since they are the largest player in the China mkt.
Grew from 4T tokens/day in 2024/12 to 30T tokens/day last month. Same ballpark as Google's 43T If we look at In-App AI in China, the top players are Baidu, Douyin (Doubao here), Wechat, Tencent news, Alipay, Gaode, Weibo, Douyin light speed, Baidu fast & Quark.

All major search apps in China also query AI just like Google does in US. Wide spread AI-based searches.

HW isn't the only one in China working hard at optical module network or SuperNode or OCS.

Xizhi Tech showcased its LightSphere X distributed OCS all optical SuperNode @ WAIC 2025.

It partnered w/ Biren Tech & its BR166L GPU + ZTE to connect together 2000 GPUs in 1 SuperNode.
InnoLight is the biggest player in the optical module industry. It's rumored to be Google's sole OCS supplier & will also supply 1.6T modules to Google & Nvidia + domestic customers. Eoptolink's 1.6T optical module has also been validated by Nvidia & its 800G supplies Google.

HW's Atlas 950/960 SuperPoD are truly innovative products. It offsets China's disadvantage in advanced node chip fabrication by increasing memory, optimizing for FP4/8 & building large super node using HW's networking expertise.

More smaller AI die connected like it's all in 1. HW utilizes an all optical network built w/ OCS (optical circuit switch). OCS is not new. Google built super nodes w/ 4096 TPUs.

HW tries to scale up this further w/ OXC (optical cross connect) to address limitation of increasing complex web of connections as # of nodes grow.

Laser is a cornerstone tech for other advanced techs like fiber optics, Lidar, laser cutting/cleaning machines & ofc laser interferometer.

China was weak in high-end laser until recent, but has now built full supply chain. Big players are Han's laser, HGTech & Wuhan Raycus.

Requires upstream breakthroughs in optical/electronic material, optical/laser chips, digital control, solid state laser, mechanical system, power source & gas laser machines.

Different types of lasers require different upstream supply chain. See below for domestic ratio of 1-3kw to 10kw+ from 2019 to 2023:

In 2019, China produced 20% of laser it needed above 6kw. By 2023, it produced 86% of its 10kw+ demand, 77% of 6-10kw & 99% in sub-6kw laser mkt.

all this happened while demand exploded across the board.

We are in 2025Q4 & HW has already showcased Atlas-960 SuperPoD w/ 2.2 TB/s interconnect & 34 PB/s total interconnect + 9.6 TB/s memory speed + the full system-level performance.

ppl on X are using metrics like PP/$ to measure AI-chips. Spend less time thinking about per chip cost or performance.

Think about things on a system level. Why does HW emphasize the all optical connections bw cabinets? Why does HW create its own HBM for inference? What about the push for SiPo chips w/ self generating light for optical modules? What about HW's new UB Mesh protocol?

How is HW able to do 15488 card SuperNodes, but Nvidia can only do 72 or 144?

https://x.com/tphuang/status/1983543440651497923

AI chip cost is a tiny portion of overall AI DC buildout cost. America is never going to be competitive vs China in cost per 100 EFLOPS of compute.

Especially not when companies like Meta are building their AI servers in the home of CJNG cartel & wasting expensive AI chips.

Next in my series of Wassenaar breakthroughs is on oscilloscope + related Signal Analyzers/Generators & Network Analyzers.

SiCarrier oscilloscope unveiling is the trigger behind this series of threads.
Why are these machines so important & what kind of breakthroughs did we see?

1st of all, oscilloscopes are really important in semi industry. You need 60GHz band one to test 7nm chip communication & a 90GHz one to test 3 to 5nm.

You need it for Serdes testing, especially as AI chip interconnect require ever fast speed. 224G requires 50x # of test vs 54G

Final part of my series on China's semi material progress in past yr are regarding to Diamond & AlN, the other 2 4th gen semi material.

Diamond is basically the ideal material for heat sink in high power applications. GaO/N epitaxy-on-diamond IC has significant power advantages In the past yr, we have seen both Xian Jiaotong University & ZS Tech achieve 2-inch wafer mass production tech. This allows the start of commercial application for diamond substrate in higher cost chips.

Next in my series of Wassenaar breakthroughs is ceramics & Ceramic matrix composite (CMC) materials.

China succeeded in advancing its own SiCf/SiC + Cf/SiC CMCs in the past couple of yrs + SiN fiber application & continuous fiber production.

What are their applications & where is China making the breakthroughs? CMC using Cf/SiC is widely used in aerospace industry in remote sensing satellite cameras.

Such material can achieve near-zero thermal expansion coefficient + improve dimensional stability of space camera components.
Low density can reduce overall weight of camera -> lighter launch cost & increased sat payload capacity

CXMT shared @ IEEE 2025 ASICON that it is launching LPDDR5X products w/ thickness of just 0.58mm.

Its product lineup including 12/16/24/32GB option w/ speed of 8533/9600/10677 Mbps. This matches what the big 3 offers to the mkt. Likely indicates CXMT has succeeded in 14nm node. Samsung started mass production of LPDDR5X last yr on its 12nm node w/ 0.65mm thickness w/ 12/16GB options, so CXMT has surpassed that offering w/ thinner package & larger memory options.

This is rapid progress for CXMT who only started producing 6/12GB LPDDR5 early last yr.