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Bottom Line Up Front New export licenses for long-endurance drones take effect Nov. 18 and cover engines, datalinks and swarm control technology, China's Commerce Ministry said. A domestic AI supercluster goes on public display in Shenzhen, where state broadcaster CCTV called the Sugon 8000 China's first all-domestic cluster of 100,000 accelerator cards. Xi Jinping urged computing, power and water coordination on a visit to Inner Mongolia, and CCTV figures show computing's electricity use grew more than five times as fast as national demand in 2025. DeepSeek released V4.1 Flash-1017 on Saturday to run its website, app and API, and also opened Search and Fetch APIs that let developers' agents run web searches and retrieve pages. |
| China revises drone export controls to license drones, engines and swarm technology The Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), which runs China's export licensing, will require a license under revised rules from Nov. 18 for drones that can fly beyond the operator's sight for 30 minutes or more, and for drones with a range of 300 kilometers or more. Drones with 30 minutes to three hours of endurance are covered if they can take off and fly stably in gusts of at least 46.3 kilometers per hour; those flying three hours or more are covered regardless. Chinese exporters of drones, engines, datalinks and flight control technology above the listed thresholds must apply for a license, though drones in the lowest endurance tier can ship after the exporter registers each shipment. The rules were issued with customs and the Central Military Commission's Equipment Development Department. They cover swarm operation at several layers, from swarm flight control technology to radio links that let one ground station command more than 10 drones. |
| China displays what it claims is its first all-domestic 100,000-accelerator AI computing cluster The Sugon 8000, completed this year and called China's first all-domestic AI supercluster of 100,000 accelerator cards by state broadcaster CCTV, went on display at the National High-Performance Computing Conference in Shenzhen. If the all-domestic claim holds, a cluster of this size lets Chinese operators run large-model training and scientific simulation at that scale without imported chips. Each card is an accelerator board carrying an AI chip. CCTV says it runs high-precision simulation and AI training on one infrastructure, with simulation generating data the AI screens and then re-checking the few candidates the AI picks. Ten application results from the system were announced at the conference. |
| Xi tells China's data center industry to coordinate computing with power and water supply Xi Jinping told staff at a high-tech zone in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, on Friday to attend to "computeComputeThe processing power used to train and run AI models, usually measured in chips, GPU-hours or FLOPs.-power and power-grid coordination" and "compute-power and water coordination," Xinhua and CCTV reported. A direct instruction from Xi tells planners siting new data centers to treat grid and water supply as requirements. CCTV figures show computing's electricity use grew more than five times as fast as national demand in 2025. Ulanqab hosts hub nodes for "East Data West Computing," the national program that builds data centers in energy-rich western regions to serve eastern cities. A UCloud data center there uses air-cooled chillers suited to the cold climate, which CCTV says cut water use by more than 92% against water cooling. |
| DeepSeek updates its AI model and starts selling web-search tools to developers DeepSeek released V4.1 Flash-1017 on Saturday, swapping it in as the model behind its website, app and application programming interface (API), Phoenix Tech reported in an article republished by 36Kr. Coding agents, AI systems that write and run code over multistep tasks, run up costs at every step. A model that solves more tasks for less lowers what developers pay to automate software work. On the DeepSWE benchmark chart DeepSeek published, the new version's best first-attempt solve rate was 77.0%, up from about 74% for the previous version, at an average cost of about 1.3 yuan ($0.19) a task. The company also opened Search and Fetch APIs that let developers' agents run web searches and retrieve pages, at 5 yuan ($0.75) per 1,000 successful requests. |
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| International standards bodies publish Chinese-led framework for brain-computer interfaces The International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission jointly published a reference architecture standard for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), systems that turn brain signals into commands for computers. A reference architecture is the common blueprint that later, more specific standards for BCI data, interfaces and testing build on, and a Chinese expert led the drafting of this one. Experts from 10 other countries, including the United States, Japan and Germany, took part in drafting it, CCTV reported. |
| China puts tunnel-boring machines and other heavy construction equipment under export controls The Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and customs will require a license from Nov. 18 to export tunnel-boring machines to what Beijing calls "sensitive countries and regions in dispute with China." Buyers there would need a license to get the machines, while buyers everywhere else must pledge not to pass them on to those places. Foreign firms and individuals may not pass Chinese-made machines to them without a license. The rule also covers walking excavators, which move on articulated legs, and concrete spraying machines built for work above 3,000 meters. Controlled tunnel-boring items include cutterheads, main drive systems and the units that set concrete lining rings, plus technology for remanufacturing the machines. |
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| III | QUANTUM & FRONTIER SCIENCE | |
| Chinese university's accelerator-driven neutron source enters full operation A neutron source built by East China University of Technology with partners including the China Academy of Engineering Physics, the state institute behind China's nuclear weapons program, passed acceptance and entered official operation. The facility, called ECANS, uses an electron accelerator to generate neutron beams for experiments and for irradiating materials. Researchers have already used ECANS to make copper-67, a radioactive isotope used in experimental targeted cancer treatments, with high-energy photons for the first time in China, laying groundwork for curie-level production. The team said the work has also laid groundwork for producing actinium-225, another isotope used in experimental cancer therapy, the same way. |
| Chinese grid researchers measure high-voltage line discharge at 5,000 meters in Tibet State Grid's China Electric Power Research Institute measured corona discharge, the electricity that leaks from high-voltage lines into the surrounding air, at a 5,000-meter test site in Amdo, Tibet. Thinner air lets current leak more easily, and measured data lets grid designers size conductors and towers for plateau lines instead of extrapolating from formulas built on research mostly below 4,000 meters. At the test site, the field strength at which corona begins was about 40% lower than on the plains, Science and Technology Daily reported. The data will be used to correct prediction models for conductor selection and tower design on high-altitude lines. |
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| AI company SenseTime splits model serving between domestic chips and high-end GPUs Xuan Shanming, chief technology officer of SenseTime's SenseCore computing platform, said its 10,000-card cluster at Lingang splits the work of serving AI models between domestic chips and high-bandwidth GPUs. Generating an answer is the stage limited by memory bandwidth, so keeping high-bandwidth GPUs for it and moving prompt processing onto domestic chips lets SenseTime serve more traffic from the same top-end cards. In one test with the same number of flagship cards, Xuan said, the split raised output, measured in tokens of text, to five times the baseline. Some setups need 30 to 50 lower- or mid-tier prompt-processing nodes to keep pace with one answer-generating node, he said. |
Chinese research ship completes Arctic trial of domestic satellite internet, adding a Tibet linkThe research vessel Jidi, on China's 16th Arctic expedition, completed a near-operational trial of domestic satellite internet on the Arctic route, Xinhua reported. It also joined the Arctic, Antarctica's Qinling Station and a test station in Tibet in one networked call, building on the Arctic-Antarctica satellite video call reported in the October 7th edition. Chinese drifting ocean buoys now transmit their readings over the domestic satellite network, so ocean data once relayed by international satellites can stay on Chinese infrastructure. Over the voyage, the Jidi has exchanged more than 100 GB of data and held more than 40 video conferences over the domestic network, an on-site tester said. |
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