Nvidia China AI share collapses: Huawei hits 50%

Samantha: Welcome to The State of Tech, The European Edition, Tuesday June thirty, 2026. I'm Samantha Lawrence.

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: South Korea bets one point two trillion dollars on chips, AI and robotics; OpenAI previews its next-generation GPT-5.6 family; Nvidia's AI chip business in China collapses as Huawei takes the lead; a Hong Kong listing for a key humanoid robot parts maker; and to close out, two things you can actually use today, the open-source writing tool Manuskript and the privacy-friendly browser Mullvad Browser. Let's start with Seoul.

South Korea commits one point two trillion dollars to dominate chips, AI and robotics globally.

Samantha: South Korea is going all in. The government in Seoul has announced a plan worth nearly one point two trillion dollars over several years to lock in its leadership in semiconductors, artificial intelligence and robotics. The headline number inside that plan: Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together are putting up around eight hundred trillion won, that's about five hundred and eighteen billion dollars, to build four new advanced chip plants in the southwest of the country. President Lee Jae-myung is throwing political weight behind it, and the goal is to create what officials call a nationwide chip ecosystem, with new AI data centres and a serious push into robotics on top.

Bob: And the timing is not subtle. Global demand for AI hardware is going through the roof, and every major economy is now trying to make sure it owns part of that supply chain. South Korea already has two of the biggest memory chip makers in the world, but this plan is about going beyond memory, into the kind of advanced logic chips that train and run AI models. There's also a regional angle: by putting the new plants in the southwest, Seoul is trying to spread industrial activity outside the capital region, which has been a political priority for years.

Samantha: For Europe, this matters in two directions. On the upside, more capacity for advanced chips and AI infrastructure could ease the bottlenecks that European carmakers, industrial firms and cloud providers have been struggling with. ASML in the Netherlands stands to benefit too, since those new fabs will need the most advanced lithography machines, and ASML is essentially the only supplier. On the downside, the European Chips Act, which set aside around forty-three billion euros, looks modest next to a half-trillion-dollar private commitment from just two Korean companies. Industry groups in Brussels have argued for years that Europe's response is undersized compared to what's happening in Asia and the US.

Bob: There's also a strategic dimension. South Korea is openly framing this as an industrial answer to both Chinese self-sufficiency and American export controls. For European policymakers watching from the sidelines, the message is that the chip race is no longer about catching up on volume, it's about controlling the entire stack, from design to manufacturing to the data centres that run the models. Whether Europe can match that level of coordination between government and private capital is the open question.

OpenAI starts a limited preview of its GPT-5.6 family, with new safety controls.

Samantha: OpenAI has begun a limited preview of its next-generation models, the GPT-5.6 series. There are three of them: the flagship is called Sol, a balanced middle option called Terra, and a faster, cheaper one called Luna. The company is highlighting Sol in particular for what it calls agentic capabilities, which in plain terms means the model can carry out longer, multi-step tasks on its own, especially in cybersecurity, software development and biology research. There's also a so-called ultra mode that uses smaller helper models in the background to tackle complex jobs.

Bob: What's notable here is the safety framing. OpenAI says this launch comes with its most extensive safety stack to date, including stronger protections against misuse in high-risk areas. And the rollout is explicitly being coordinated with the US administration's cyber executive order framework. That's a significant shift. We're moving from a world where AI labs released models and regulators reacted, to one where the release itself is sequenced with government policy. Broader availability is expected in the coming weeks.

Samantha: For European users and companies, access will initially come through the API, with US partners getting the first look. That creates a familiar lag for European developers, who often wait weeks or months for full feature parity. The bigger question is how these models interact with the EU AI Act. Systems with strong agentic capabilities, ones that can take actions on their own in cybersecurity or biology, are exactly the category European regulators have flagged as needing extra scrutiny. Expect conversations between OpenAI and the European AI Office about what documentation and testing will be required before Sol can be widely offered to EU customers.

Bob: And there's a competitive angle. European cybersecurity firms have been building tools on top of existing AI models for the past two years. A model that's specifically tuned for security workflows could either be a huge productivity boost for them, or a threat if OpenAI starts offering competing services directly. The bottom line: faster, more capable AI agents are coming, and the rules of engagement are being written in real time.

Samantha: Quick interruption. If you listen to The State of Tech regularly, hit that like button and subscribe, that way you'll never miss an episode. Okay, moving on.

Nvidia's AI chip sales in China collapse as Huawei grabs around half the market.

Bob: Nvidia's position in China is unravelling fast. According to industry analysts, the company's share of the Chinese AI chip market could drop to roughly eight percent this year, while Huawei's share is on track to reach about fifty percent. That is a dramatic reversal. Just two years ago Nvidia was the default choice for Chinese AI labs and cloud providers. Now Huawei's Ascend 950 series is being described as broadly comparable to Nvidia's H200 in several respects, which closes a gap most Western analysts thought would take much longer to bridge.

Samantha: The driver here is partly policy and partly capability. US export controls have steadily cut off Nvidia's most advanced chips from Chinese buyers, and Beijing has poured resources into homegrown alternatives. Huawei has used that window to scale up production and improve the software ecosystem around its chips, which historically was the weak spot. Chinese cloud providers and AI labs are now treating Ascend as a credible primary option, not just a backup.

Bob: For Europe, the implications are subtle but important. First, a less dominant Nvidia globally could mean better pricing and availability for European AI data centres, which have been competing with US hyperscalers for every chip. Second, a stronger Huawei in AI hardware creates a new policy question for European governments. Several EU members have already restricted Huawei in telecom networks. If Huawei becomes a major exporter of AI accelerators, similar debates could open up around data centres and critical infrastructure.

Samantha: And there's a broader market signal. The era of a single dominant AI chip supplier is ending, at least regionally. Chinese firms have an alternative, US firms have Nvidia and AMD, and Europe is still figuring out where its own capabilities sit. The takeaway is that AI hardware is splitting along geopolitical lines, and that fragmentation will shape who builds what kind of AI models, and where, for years to come.

Humanoid robot parts maker Laifual Drive lists in Hong Kong, raising over a billion Hong Kong dollars.

Bob: Switching gears to robotics hardware. Laifual Drive, a Chinese company that makes a specific component called a harmonic reducer, is starting to trade on the Hong Kong stock exchange today. These reducers are essentially precision gearboxes that sit inside the joints of humanoid robots, controlling how smoothly an arm or leg moves. Laifual is selling more than thirteen million shares and aiming to raise around one point one five billion Hong Kong dollars. The company holds roughly twenty-one percent of the Chinese market for robotic harmonic reducers by shipment volume.

Samantha: This listing tells you something about where the robotics industry is right now. The big headlines usually focus on the robots themselves, from Tesla's Optimus to various Chinese humanoid projects. But the real bottleneck for mass production is the supply of high-precision parts. Harmonic reducers are notoriously hard to manufacture at scale and at consistent quality. A few Japanese firms dominated this market for decades. Chinese suppliers like Laifual and its rival Leaderdrive are now serious players, and the public listing gives them capital to expand capacity.

Bob: For European robotics companies, this is a mixed picture. On one hand, more global supply of precision components could lower costs and shorten lead times, which European industrial robot makers and humanoid robot startups would welcome. On the other hand, it reinforces how much of the humanoid robot supply chain is concentrated in Asia. European players in the space, from Germany's Neura Robotics to Norway's 1X, are designing the systems, but they often rely on components from outside Europe.

Samantha: The bigger signal is that investors are now willing to bet serious money on humanoid robotics actually reaching mass production. A specialist parts supplier going public, rather than a flashy robot maker, is the kind of move that happens when an industry is shifting from prototype to product. Whether that confidence is justified by actual demand in the next two to three years is the open question.

Try Manuskript, the free open-source writing app built for long projects and structured stories.

Bob: Time for two things you can actually try today. First up is Manuskript, an open-source writing application aimed at people working on longer projects, novels, theses, research papers, anything where you need to keep track of structure, characters and notes alongside the actual text. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and it's completely free.

Samantha: What makes Manuskript stand out is that it bundles together features that writers usually have to cobble together from multiple tools. There's an outliner where you can break your project into chapters and scenes, a distraction-free writing mode, a section for character profiles and world-building notes, and a way to set word count targets per chapter. Users on writing forums often describe it as a free alternative to Scrivener, which is the better-known paid tool in this category. The difference, of course, is that Manuskript costs nothing and stores everything locally on your own machine.

Bob: That local storage point matters for European users in particular. Your draft never gets uploaded to a cloud service, which means no questions about training AI models on your manuscript, no subscription fees in euros that creep up every year, and no worries about what happens if the company behind the tool gets acquired or shuts down. The project is hosted on GitHub and has been actively maintained by a community of contributors.

Samantha: It does take a bit of setup. You'll spend the first hour learning where everything lives in the interface, and it's not as polished as commercial alternatives. But for anyone with a writing project sitting half-finished on their hard drive, or who has been put off by Scrivener's price tag, it's worth installing this afternoon. Just download it from the official site, open it up, and start a new project. The outliner alone often gets people unstuck.

Mullvad Browser is the privacy-first browser from the makers of a no-logs Swedish VPN.

Bob: Our second pick is Mullvad Browser, a free privacy-focused web browser developed by the Swedish VPN company Mullvad in collaboration with the Tor Project. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and you do not need to be a Mullvad VPN customer to use it. The idea is to give regular users a browser that strips out tracking by default, without the complexity of running Tor.

Samantha: The browser is built on Firefox, but it's been heavily modified to reduce what's called fingerprinting, the techniques websites use to identify you even when you block cookies. It comes with strong default settings, blocks third-party trackers, and ships without telemetry. For users who have been looking for something between a standard browser like Chrome and the full Tor Browser, this sits in a useful middle ground. It's faster than Tor because it doesn't route through the Tor network, but more private than mainstream browsers out of the box.

Bob: For European users this fits neatly with the privacy expectations set by the GDPR. Mullvad is based in Sweden, and the company has built a reputation for not logging user data, even refusing to keep email addresses tied to accounts. The browser is free, the download is straightforward, and you can use it alongside your existing browser, keeping one for daily logins and the other for general browsing where you don't want to be tracked.

Samantha: One practical tip: when you first open it, the privacy settings are already cranked up, which means some websites might look broken or ask you to solve more captchas. That's the trade-off. For anyone curious about reducing their digital footprint without going full anonymity mode, downloading Mullvad Browser this afternoon is a low-effort experiment.

Samantha: Today we covered: South Korea's one point two trillion dollar tech bet, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 preview, Nvidia losing ground to Huawei in China, the Laifual Drive listing in humanoid robot parts, and two things to try yourself: Manuskript and Mullvad Browser.

Bob: Want to know more or react? Visit stateoftech.eu or email us at info@doorzetters.net.

Bob: State of Tech, the tech world in 15 minutes.