Insilico AI drug reverses ageing + Malaysia picks Huawei

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

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: an AI-designed drug that appears to reverse biological ageing, Malaysia picking Huawei chips over American ones for its sovereign AI project, a Nvidia chip loophole clouding a fresh US-China AI summit, IonQ's investor day and its bet on owning the quantum supply chain, and to close out two things you can actually use today, the encrypted European note app CryptPad and the offline navigation app Magic Earth Pro. Let's start with the drug story.

Insilico Medicine says its AI-discovered lung drug shows signs of reversing biological age in patients.

Samantha: Insilico Medicine has published new research on a drug called rentosertib. It was originally designed by AI to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring lung disease. But when researchers ran patient samples through six independent ageing clocks, all six pointed the same way: patients on the drug looked biologically younger than before treatment. The work was done with scientists from Harvard Medical School and Stanford, and presented at a Nature conference in Paris. That's a serious lineup for what is still an early signal.

Bob: The mechanism matters here. These ageing clocks read patterns in blood proteins and translate them into a biological age. Six different clocks, developed independently, agreeing on the same direction is unusual. It doesn't prove the drug adds years to your life, but it does suggest the AI-designed molecule is touching biology that matters beyond the lungs. Insilico is framing this as a template: pick a disease, design a drug with generative AI, then measure whether ageing biomarkers move alongside the primary endpoint.

Samantha: And that framing is the real news. Until now, longevity drugs have lived in a grey zone between wellness marketing and hard clinical science. What Insilico is proposing is running ageing biomarkers inside proper regulated trials, alongside the disease the drug is actually approved to treat. If regulators accept that data, the path to genuine geroprotective drugs gets a lot shorter. That's a very different world from expensive supplements and self-experimenters.

Bob: For Europe specifically, this lands in an interesting spot. The European Medicines Agency has been cautious about surrogate endpoints, and ageing clocks are exactly that. But European hospitals and academic centres are heavily involved in the underlying biomarker science, and the Paris venue is not a coincidence. If this framework gets traction, European regulators will have to decide whether they want to lead on how ageing is measured in trials, or wait for the FDA to set the rules first.

Samantha: The honest caveat: this is one study, in patients with a specific lung disease, using biomarkers rather than long-term outcomes. Nobody is living longer yet, on paper. But the combination of AI-designed molecule, multiple independent clocks agreeing, and top-tier academic partners means this is not a press release you can dismiss. It's the kind of result that quietly reshapes what a drug trial is allowed to measure.

Malaysia leans toward Huawei chips for its national AI project, defying US export warnings.

Bob: Bloomberg reports that Malaysia is preparing to use Huawei accelerators for a two-billion-ringgit sovereign AI project. If it goes through, Malaysia becomes the first foreign government to openly pick Chinese AI chips over American ones for a flagship national build. Washington warned last year that buying these specific chips could breach US export controls, so this is a deliberate choice, not an accident. Two billion ringgit is roughly four hundred million euros, modest in global terms, but the symbolism is enormous.

Samantha: What makes this significant is the precedent. Countries have quietly bought Chinese networking gear for years, but AI accelerators sit at the top of the export control pyramid. Malaysia saying yes in public gives cover to others in Southeast Asia and beyond who have been weighing the same trade-off. Cheaper, more available Chinese silicon on one side, versus the risk of being cut off from American ecosystems on the other. This is the first domino falling in daylight.

Bob: For Europe the read-across is uncomfortable. European governments have publicly committed to American chips for their sovereign AI plans, from Germany's Jupiter supercomputer to French compute programmes. But procurement officials are watching Malaysia closely, because if Huawei silicon actually delivers on a national workload, the argument that there is no alternative starts to weaken. Europe won't switch tomorrow, but the negotiating leverage with Nvidia shifts the moment a credible second option exists on the map.

Samantha: There's also the enforcement question. If Malaysia proceeds and Washington doesn't retaliate hard, the export control regime looks porous. If Washington does retaliate, it drives more countries toward the Chinese stack out of frustration. Either way, the era of assuming every serious AI build runs on American chips is ending, and it's ending faster than the export control framework was designed for.

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.

A reported Nvidia chip export loophole casts a shadow over the first US-China AI summit of Trump's second term.

Bob: An investigative report claims that the American subsidiary of a blacklisted Chinese server maker has been shipping advanced Nvidia AI chips to Southeast Asia, effectively routing hardware around US export controls. The timing is awkward, because Washington and Beijing are meant to hold their first formal AI dialogue in mid-September, since President Trump's second term began. The agenda covers AI-directed cyberattacks and intelligence sharing, and now it also covers this.

Samantha: The loophole itself is the sort of thing export control lawyers have been warning about for over a year. A blacklisted parent company sets up or keeps a US subsidiary, that subsidiary buys chips legally, then the chips move on to markets where end-use is much harder to track. If the reporting holds up, it undermines the entire premise of chip diplomacy, that Washington can meaningfully control where its most powerful accelerators end up.

Bob: For the summit itself, this changes the tone. Chinese negotiators can now point to the loophole and argue that American export controls are theatre, while American negotiators arrive under pressure from Congress to tighten enforcement before talking about cooperation on AI safety. Genuine progress on shared risks, like AI-enabled cyberattacks, becomes harder when both sides are fighting over the chip flow underneath.

Samantha: Europe sits awkwardly in the middle here. Brussels has been building its own AI governance stack through the AI Act, and has quietly hoped that a US-China dialogue would eventually create room for a three-way conversation on safety standards. If this summit collapses into a chip-controls argument, that hope fades, and Europe ends up as the only major bloc with binding AI rules while the two largest players talk past each other. It's a lonelier regulatory position than European officials wanted.

Bob: Worth watching over the next week: whether Nvidia itself comments, whether the named subsidiary faces sanctions, and whether the summit gets rescheduled or slimmed down. Chip export enforcement has been the single most consequential technology policy of the last three years, and today's story suggests the enforcement side has been quietly losing.

IonQ hosts investor day with its SkyWater semiconductor deal at the centre of the quantum story.

Samantha: IonQ is holding its investor day today, and the headline item is its recent acquisition of SkyWater Technology. SkyWater runs semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the United States, and IonQ is buying it to bring chip production for its quantum systems in-house. For a sector that has spent a decade promising breakthroughs and delivering mostly demos, a vertical integration move like this is a genuine shift in strategy.

Bob: The logic is straightforward. Quantum computers, whatever the underlying technology, still need very specialised classical chips to control and read out the quantum bits. Right now those chips are made in tiny volumes at contract foundries, which is expensive and slow. Owning a fab means IonQ can iterate on control electronics much faster, and it locks in supply as the sector scales. It also insulates them from geopolitical pressure on chip supply chains, which is now a board-level concern everywhere.

Samantha: For investors, the interesting question is whether IonQ can actually run a fab. Building quantum systems and operating semiconductor manufacturing are very different disciplines, and plenty of tech companies have burned money learning that lesson. The investor day is essentially IonQ arguing that the two disciplines are close enough, and that owning both is cheaper than outsourcing at scale. That case has to be made with numbers today, not just vision slides.

Bob: For Europe, this is a signal about where the quantum industry is heading. European quantum efforts, from the German trapped-ion players to French photonic startups, have mostly relied on external chip supply. If IonQ's vertical model works, European quantum companies and their government funders will have to decide whether to follow, or accept a structural cost disadvantage. That conversation is already happening quietly inside national research councils.

Samantha: The broader takeaway is that quantum is starting to behave like a real industry rather than a science project. Acquisitions, supply chain control, investor day guidance: these are the moves of a company trying to become infrastructure. Whether IonQ deserves the Nvidia-of-quantum label people keep attaching to it is still an open question, but today is one of the days it has to prove the comparison is not absurd.

CryptPad is the encrypted European office suite that keeps your documents genuinely private.

Bob: To close out, two things you can actually use today. First, CryptPad. It's a free, open-source office suite developed by a French company, and it works entirely in your browser. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations, kanban boards, polls, and shared whiteboards, all encrypted end-to-end. The servers hosting your files literally cannot read them, because the encryption keys stay in your browser session. For anyone who has been looking for a Google Docs alternative that does not send every keystroke to a US cloud, this is the most complete option around.

Samantha: What makes CryptPad practical rather than just principled is that collaboration actually works. You share a link, the other person opens it, and you both edit in real time, the same as any mainstream suite. There's a free tier with generous storage, and paid plans if you want more space or a self-hosted instance for a team. It runs on any modern browser, no install required, and there's a mobile-friendly view for quick edits on a phone.

Bob: Reviewers highlight the shared whiteboard and the kanban tool as the standout features for teams that used to bounce between Miro, Trello, and Docs. It's not going to replace a full Microsoft 365 rollout for a large enterprise, but for freelancers, small teams, journalists, lawyers, or anyone handling sensitive drafts, it covers the daily work without the surveillance layer. Worth spending twenty minutes with this afternoon to see if it fits how you actually work.

Samantha: One practical tip, CryptPad works best if you create a free account rather than using it purely anonymously, because then your documents persist across sessions and devices. The account itself needs only an email, no phone number, and the whole thing is hosted in France under European data protection rules. If your organisation has been quietly worrying about where its documents live, this is a genuine answer rather than a compromise.

Magic Earth Pro gives European drivers full offline navigation across the continent, no tracking, no subscription surprises.

Bob: The second pick is Magic Earth Pro. It's a navigation app built by a small European company, and it does something surprisingly rare in 2026: it gives you turn-by-turn driving, cycling, walking and public transport directions across all of Europe, entirely offline once you download the maps, without an account and without tracking your location. It runs on iOS and Android, and the core app is free.

Samantha: What sets Magic Earth apart from the better-known offline options is the quality of the driving experience. Users report lane guidance, speed camera warnings, and real-time traffic that actually work in smaller European cities, not just the big capitals. The maps are based on OpenStreetMap, which means updates come from local contributors who know their neighbourhoods, and the routing engine has clearly been tuned for European road layouts rather than American grids.

Bob: The Pro tier unlocks head-up display mode, dashcam recording, and a few advanced routing options, for a modest one-time payment rather than a subscription. That pricing model alone makes it stand out, since almost every mainstream navigation app has moved to monthly fees or ad-supported free tiers. For anyone driving across borders this autumn, or cycling routes where mobile coverage is patchy, spending ten minutes downloading the country maps you need is worth doing before your next trip.

Samantha: The one thing to know is that first-time setup takes a little patience, you need to download each country's map individually, and some are several gigabytes. Do it on wifi, ideally the night before you travel. Once that's done, the app works with no signal at all, which matters in Alpine tunnels, rural Portugal, or the parts of the Balkans where roaming still gets expensive.

Samantha: Today we covered: an AI-designed drug from Insilico Medicine showing signs of reversing biological age, Malaysia picking Huawei chips for its sovereign AI project, a Nvidia export loophole clouding the US-China AI summit, IonQ's investor day and its SkyWater acquisition, and two things to try yourself: the encrypted European office suite CryptPad, and the offline navigation app Magic Earth Pro.

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.