SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son is seeking to team up with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to realize what could be his biggest bet yet -- a trillion-dollar industrial complex in Arizona to build robots and artificial intelligence. Son envisions a version of the vast manufacturing hub of China's Shenzhen that would bring back high-tech manufacturing to the U.S., according to people familiar with the billionaire's thinking. The park may comprise production lines for AI-powered industrial robots, they said, asking not to be named as the plan remains private. SoftBank officials are keen to have the Taiwanese maker of Nvidia's advanced AI chips play a prominent role in the project, although it's not clear what part Son sees for TSMC, which already plans to invest 165 billion in the U.S. and has started mass production at its first Arizona factory. Nor is it clear that TSMC would be interested.

Japan is encouraging energy importers to secure liquefied natural gas (LNG) past 2050 -- the deadline the second-biggest buyer of the fossil fuel has set itself for net zero emissions. Several of the country's largest LNG buyers are considering 20-year supply deals with projects that would start after 2030, according to people with knowledge of the discussions, who asked not to be named as the negotiations are private. They aim to deploy technology such as carbon capture and storage to mitigate the emissions from burning the super-chilled fossil fuel under Japan's national target. The government expects a boom in artificial intelligence, data centers and semiconductor chip-making factories to revive power demand, which has been tracking a declining population for years. It sees LNG as vital to energy security, even as it works on increasing renewable energy generation and restarting nuclear reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima No. 1 disaster.

White House crypto and artificial intelligence czar David Sacks warned that China has grown adept at evading U.S. export controls and is, at most, two years behind American semiconductor design capabilities. In a Bloomberg Television interview on Wednesday, Sacks said the U.S. should be concerned that Huawei Technologies is moving fast to catch up to its rivals outside China. He said that DeepSeek's breakthrough AI model earlier this year demonstrated how China could still advance even with export controls in place. "Before DeepSeek, people thought that Chinese AI models were years behind, and we realized that they are only months behind," Sacks said.

Russia's flagship economic forum kicked off Wednesday with stalls selling Russian President Vladimir Putin-themed merchandise and humanoid robots, but Westerners were few and far between -- despite warming ties between Moscow and Washington under U.S. President Donald Trump. Once dubbed "Russia's Davos," the annual Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) is designed to attract foreign investment and is the biggest showcase of Russian technology and business. Some 20,000 guests from 140 countries are set to take part in the forum over the next four days, both online and in person, according to the Kremlin.

Elon Musk's Neuralink used a brain implant to enable a monkey to see something that wasn't physically there, according to an engineer, as it moves toward its goal of helping blind people see. The device, called Blindsight, stimulated areas of a monkey's brain associated with vision, Neuralink engineer Joseph O'Doherty said Friday at a conference. At least two-thirds of the time, the monkey moved its eyes toward something researchers were trying to trick the brain into visualizing. The results were the first Neuralink has publicized about tests of Blindsight, a brain chip that mimics the function of an eye. This is a closely watched frontier for brain device development, a scientific field that's testing the boundaries of how technology can be used to potentially treat intractable conditions.

The renewed U.S.-China trade truce struck in London left a key area of export restrictions tied to national security untouched, an unresolved conflict that threatens a more comprehensive deal, two people briefed on detailed outcomes of the talks have said. Beijing has not committed to grant export clearance for some specialized rare-earth magnets that U.S. military suppliers need for fighter jets and missile systems, the people said. The United States maintains export curbs on China's purchases of advanced artificial intelligence chips out of concern that they also have military applications. At talks in London last week, China's negotiators appeared to link progress in lifting export controls on military-use rare earth magnets with the longstanding U.S. curbs on exports of the most advanced AI chips to China. That marked a new twist in trade talks that began with opioid trafficking, tariff rates and China's trade surplus, but have since shifted to focus on export controls.

Meta has poached top engineers from multiple tech firms, including Google, for a new team focused on achieving a more advanced form of AI called artificial general intelligence. Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google DeepMind, is expected to join Meta's "superintelligence" team, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the information is not public. Meta has also recruited Johan Schalkwyk, a machine learning lead at AI voice startup Sesame, other people said. Alexandr Wang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Scale, is also expected to be part of the team after Meta finalizes a multibillion-dollar investment in the data labeling startup that could be announced as soon as this week.

A concentrated, nine-minute-long Russian drone attack on Ukraine's second largest city of Kharkiv in the middle of the night killed six people and injured 64, including nine children, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday. The overnight attack followed Russia's two biggest air assaults of the war on Ukraine this week, part of intensified bombardments that Moscow says are retaliatory measures for Kyiv's recent attacks in Russia. Elsewhere, two southern Ukrainian regions, Mykolaiv and Kherson, were left without electricity on Wednesday after Russian forces attacked an energy facility, the governors said.

The government, at an expert panel meeting on Wednesday, proposed easing the Japanese language proficiency requirement for non-Japanese drivers working in the country, aiming to address the serious labor shortages in the bus and taxi industry. The panel met at the Justice Ministry to discuss the country's foreign worker programs. Japan accepts foreign bus and taxi drivers under the Type 1 category of its residency status system for foreign nationals with certain skill levels. With Type 1 status, they are allowed to work in Japan for up to five years.

Chinese electric-vehicle makers led by BYD beat Tesla in the competition to produce affordable electric vehicles. Now, many of those same fierce competitors are pulling into the passing lane in the global race to produce self-driving cars. BYD shook up China's smart-EV industry earlier this year by offering its "God's Eye" driver-assistance package for free, undercutting the technology Tesla sells for nearly 9,000 in China. "With God's Eye, Tesla's strategy starts to fall apart," said Shenzhen-based BYD investor Taylor Ogan, an American who has owned several Teslas and driven BYD cars with God's Eye, which he called more capable than Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" (FSD). Other Chinese auto and tech companies are offering affordable EVs with FSD-like technology for a relative pittance.