Huawei 2027 AI chips challenge Nvidia, NYT case shakes OpenAI

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

Bob: And I'm Bob Russell. Today: Huawei readies a two-chip AI assault on Nvidia for 2027, unsealed court documents in the New York Times case accuse Microsoft and OpenAI of knowing copyright theft, California forces advertisers to label AI-generated actors, Taiwan's Winbond buys Infineon's memory business for over a billion dollars, and to close out, two things you can actually use today: the encrypted German email service Mailfence and the free open-source panorama tool Hugin. Let's start with Huawei.

Huawei plans two new AI chips for 2027 in a direct challenge to Nvidia's dominance.

Samantha: Huawei has laid out its most ambitious AI hardware roadmap yet. At its Connect conference, rotating chairman David Wang announced two new AI accelerators, the 960DT and the Ascend 960PR, both slated for launch in 2027. The company also said it is developing ways to link large numbers of these chips together so they behave as one much larger computing system. In plain terms: if you cannot beat Nvidia on a single chip, you try to beat it on the cluster.

Bob: And that clustering piece is really the strategic core here. Nvidia's edge is not just silicon, it is the way its chips talk to each other inside a data centre. Huawei is signalling it wants to close that gap, at scale, on Chinese soil. It also fits Beijing's broader push for self-sufficiency in advanced computing, after years of US export controls that have kept Huawei off the latest Nvidia gear. A 2027 launch window is realistic, but it is also far enough away that the specs will be judged on delivery, not slides.

Samantha: For European buyers this matters in two ways. First, more high-end AI chip supply, even if it stays largely inside China, eases some of the global squeeze that has pushed up prices and lead times for training hardware in Europe. Second, it accelerates a split market: Western customers on Nvidia and AMD, Chinese customers increasingly on Huawei. European companies with operations on both sides of that divide will have to run parallel AI stacks, with different tools and different compliance rules.

Bob: There is also a geopolitical read for Brussels. The European Commission has been trying to build a domestic AI chip base through the Chips Act, and Huawei's announcement is a reminder of how far behind Europe still sits on this specific layer. Neither Nvidia nor Huawei is European. Whatever the outcome of this race, the continent's AI ambitions will keep leaning on imported accelerators for years, which sharpens the case for sovereignty debates around data centres and model training.

Samantha: The bottom line: 2027 is when the AI chip market stops being a one-horse race in the eyes of many buyers, at least on paper. Until Huawei's parts are benchmarked in real workloads, Nvidia keeps its crown. But the direction of travel is now unmistakable.

Unsealed documents in New York Times lawsuit accuse Microsoft and OpenAI of knowingly training on stolen news.

Bob: Newly unsealed court filings in the New York Times lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI contain some of the most damaging internal language yet in the AI copyright battle. According to the filings, executives internally described the scraping of millions of copyrighted news articles as, and this is the phrase used, astonishing theft. Other messages reportedly acknowledge that the products could pose an existential threat to publishers, and that users would rarely click on citations back to the original source.

Samantha: That last detail is the crucial one editorially. If OpenAI's own engineers were saying users do not click citations, that undercuts the core defence that AI answers merely point people to news sites. Instead, it suggests the systems were built to replace the click, not support it. Combine that with internal acknowledgement of the scraping, and the fair use argument gets much harder to run in front of a US jury. The Times filed this case three years ago; the unsealed material is what turns it from a legal skirmish into a potential landmark.

Bob: For Microsoft and OpenAI, the immediate risk is not just damages. It is precedent. A ruling that this training was infringement would force licensing deals across the industry, not just with the Times. That would reshape the economics of building frontier models. It also strengthens the hand of every publisher currently negotiating with an AI company: suddenly the walk-away option looks a lot more credible.

Samantha: European publishers will watch this closely. Under the EU's AI Act, general-purpose model providers already have to publish summaries of their training data and respect opt-outs under the copyright directive. A US court finding of deliberate infringement would give European regulators and courts a very concrete reference point. Groups representing German, French and Dutch news publishers have been pushing for collective licensing schemes. This case could shift the balance of those negotiations firmly in their favour.

Bob: One caveat: unsealed filings reflect one side's framing of internal messages. Microsoft and OpenAI will contest both the interpretation and the legal conclusion. But the tone of the quoted material is what makes this a genuine turning point in the story.

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.

California signs law requiring advertisers to disclose AI-generated performers in video and audio ads.

Bob: California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed Senate Bill 1050 into law. It requires advertisers to explicitly disclose when a video or audio ad uses a synthetic, AI-generated performer instead of a human actor. The bill was strongly backed by SAG-AFTRA, the US actors' union, which has spent the last two years pushing back against AI clones of performers being used without consent or credit. It follows California's broader AI safety legislation from earlier this year.

Samantha: The practical effect is a labelling requirement. If a brand runs a commercial in California featuring a wholly synthetic spokesperson, or an AI-generated voice pretending to be a real person, viewers and listeners need to be told. It does not ban synthetic performers, and it does not solve the deeper question of consent for using real actors' likenesses. But it does drag the practice into the open, which for many advertisers is uncomfortable enough to change behaviour.

Bob: California matters disproportionately here because so much of the global ad and entertainment industry runs through Los Angeles. A rule written for California quickly becomes a de facto standard for national campaigns, and often for international ones too, because agencies prefer one compliant version over many. That is exactly how the Brussels effect works in the other direction, and now California is exporting a piece of AI transparency law westward across the Pacific and eastward across the Atlantic.

Samantha: For European regulators, the timing is useful. The AI Act already requires labelling of deepfakes and certain synthetic media, but the enforcement details are still being worked out. A concrete California template, with clear definitions for advertising, gives European authorities and industry bodies something practical to compare against. Broadcasters and streamers operating in both markets will likely align on the stricter of the two rules, which usually means the labels appear everywhere.

Bob: The open question is enforcement. Disclosure laws only work if regulators actually pursue violations and if the disclosure is meaningful, not buried in three seconds of small print. That will be the real test over the next twelve months.

Winbond buys Infineon's NOR Flash and F-RAM memory business for one point one two billion dollars.

Samantha: Taiwan's Winbond Electronics is buying the NOR Flash and F-RAM product lines from German chipmaker Infineon for around one point one two billion US dollars. NOR Flash is the type of memory that stores boot code and firmware in cars, industrial machines, and medical devices, the reliable, long-lived stuff, not the mass-market flash in your phone. F-RAM is a specialty memory used where data has to survive sudden power loss. Winbond says the deal cements its position as a global leader in NOR Flash.

Bob: The timing tells you a lot. The memory chip industry is in what analysts are calling a supercycle, with a supply crunch expected to run through 2028, driven largely by AI infrastructure buying. Specialty memory like NOR and F-RAM has been quietly caught up in that squeeze, because carmakers and industrial suppliers cannot substitute it easily. By acquiring Infineon's portfolio, Winbond gets both the customer relationships and the automotive-grade product certifications, which take years to build from scratch.

Samantha: For Infineon this is a focus move. The German company has been steering its business toward power semiconductors and automotive systems, where it competes with the likes of STMicroelectronics and NXP. Selling off a solid but non-core memory line frees up capital and management attention for those bets. It also hands over responsibility for a supply chain that, in the current market, is more headache than growth story.

Bob: The European angle is mixed. On one hand, European car manufacturers and industrial groups now depend on a Taiwanese supplier for a memory type embedded in millions of vehicles and machines. That adds another layer to Europe's semiconductor supply chain concerns, especially given tensions around Taiwan. On the other hand, Winbond is committing to invest in the product line, which arguably makes long-term supply more reliable than if Infineon had wound it down quietly. Expect procurement teams at the big German carmakers to be asking for very detailed supply guarantees.

Samantha: The deal is expected to close in the coming quarters. Watch for whether other specialty memory players make similar moves; consolidation in this corner of the chip world tends to come in waves.

The encrypted German email service Mailfence gives Europeans a genuinely private inbox under EU law.

Bob: To close out, two things you can actually use today. The first is Mailfence, an encrypted email service based in Belgium and operating under European law. It offers end-to-end encryption using open standards, meaning you can exchange fully encrypted messages with anyone else using compatible tools. Unlike a lot of privacy-branded services, Mailfence uses OpenPGP, which is an open standard, so you are not locked into a proprietary format.

Samantha: The setup is straightforward. There is a free tier that gives you a modest amount of storage and the core encrypted email features, and paid tiers that add more storage, custom domains, and calendar and document tools. Because it is Belgium-based, it falls under European privacy rules rather than US surveillance frameworks, which is the reason many users choose it over the big American providers. It works in any browser, and there are mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Bob: A realistic note on what encrypted email can and cannot do. End-to-end encryption only protects the content of messages between two users who both have keys set up. Subject lines are not encrypted in the OpenPGP standard, and email to non-encrypted recipients travels the same way any regular email does. So Mailfence is a strong upgrade for private correspondence, especially for journalists, lawyers, or anyone handling sensitive material, but it is not a magic invisibility cloak.

Samantha: What users often praise is the calendar and contacts sync, which works reliably across devices without funnelling data through Google or Microsoft. If you have been meaning to move a personal or professional inbox off a big US platform, this is a credible European alternative. Signing up and importing existing mail takes maybe an hour on a Friday afternoon.

Bob: One thing to check before you commit: whether your existing contacts will actually use encrypted mail with you, because that is where the real privacy benefit lives. If not, you still gain from the European jurisdiction and the ad-free interface, but manage your expectations accordingly.

The free open-source tool Hugin stitches your holiday photos into stunning panoramas on your own computer.

Samantha: The second pick is Hugin. It is a free, open-source panorama stitcher that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. You feed it a series of overlapping photos, of a mountain range, a city skyline, the inside of a cathedral, and it aligns and blends them into a single wide image. It has been around for years in the open-source world, quietly used by photographers and hobbyists who want proper control without a subscription.

Bob: What makes Hugin worth trying now is that phone cameras have got so good that the raw material for a genuinely striking panorama is sitting in most people's photo libraries already. Your phone's built-in panorama mode is convenient, but it often produces stitched images with wobbly horizons and low resolution. Hugin lets you take a handful of standard shots, taken by simply pivoting on the spot, and combine them at full resolution.

Samantha: It is not the most polished interface you will ever meet. The tool exposes a lot of options, because panorama stitching involves things like lens correction and control points. But there is an assistant mode that walks beginners through three steps: load images, align, and create panorama. For most casual users that is enough to get a very good result within a few minutes.

Bob: The privacy angle is a bonus. Everything runs locally on your machine, no cloud upload, no account, no photos sent off to a server for processing. For anyone who has been reluctant to use online panorama services because of what happens to the original files, Hugin removes that concern entirely.

Samantha: Today we covered: Huawei's 2027 AI chip challenge to Nvidia, the unsealed New York Times allegations against Microsoft and OpenAI, California's new law on AI-generated performers in ads, Winbond's one point one two billion dollar purchase of Infineon's memory business, and two things to try yourself: Mailfence and Hugin.

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.