China Tech Weekly: CXMT Trial-Produces HBM3E, Brain-Computer Interface Restores Vision

Hi friends,

Hope you had a fun Halloween! Did you get up to anything memorable, come across a particularly good costume, or get a scare worth sharing?

Speaking of unexpected characters, Chinese social media has spent the past few months turning DeepSeek into a chubby blue whale girl in a maid outfit, obsessed with rice and notorious for avoiding work. She even has her own fan fiction universe. And she’s not alone. Claude has become Claudia, while GPT has found its way into the same fictional world.

It sounds like internet nonsense, and in some ways, it is. But it’s also a reminder that people are finding new ways to relate to AI, well beyond asking it to write code or summarize documents.

Meanwhile, the less whimsical side of China’s tech industry keeps moving. Companies are trying to build domestic alternatives to foreign chips, manufacturers are looking for new markets in the AI supply chain, and robotics companies are beginning to invest in the software and ecosystems that could make their machines more useful.

There’s also a fascinating story about a woman who can see again with the help of a brain-computer interface. Technology doesn’t get much more personal than that.

Anyway, let’s take a look.

Weekly News...

(I) A Brain Implant Helped a Woman Who Had Been Blind for Years See Again

Doctors in China have implanted a brain-computer interface in a 66-year-old woman who lost her sight to retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease. The system bypasses her damaged retinas, using an external visual sensor to send electrical signals directly to her visual cortex.

The results are remarkable, even with important limitations. Her measured visual acuity is around 0.125, equivalent to roughly 20/160 vision compared with normal 20/20 eyesight, meaning she still meets the threshold for legal blindness. But she can now navigate independently, read written characters, and recognize her grandson.

The technology points to a different approach to restoring vision: rather than repairing the eye itself, doctors are finding ways to communicate directly with the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information. It is still early clinical work, but for patients with otherwise untreatable blindness, even limited functional vision can change everyday life dramatically.

(II) China's Diamond Industry Has Found a New Customer: AI Data Centers

Henan, which produces around 80% of China’s synthetic diamonds, is looking beyond jewelry and into semiconductor manufacturing.

The reason is heat. High-performance AI accelerators generate enormous amounts of thermal energy, making heat removal an increasingly important part of data-center design. Lab-grown diamond has exceptionally high thermal conductivity, giving it potential as a heat-spreading material for advanced processors.

For Henan’s manufacturers, this could open a much more valuable market than traditional gemstone production. The region already has the industrial capacity to manufacture synthetic diamonds at scale; the challenge is adapting that expertise to the precision and reliability requirements of semiconductor packaging.

As AI chips become more powerful, the materials surrounding them are becoming just as important as the processors themselves. China’s diamond industry may have found an unexpected way into the AI supply chain.

(III) CXMT Is About to Enter the HBM Market. The Yield Problem Is Enormous.

China’s CXMT is preparing to begin limited HBM3E production within two months, an important step in its effort to supply memory for domestic AI accelerators.

But the reported manufacturing numbers reveal just how far it still has to go. Yield rates are estimated at only 20–30%, compared with roughly 70% for SK hynix, while performance remains closer to older HBM3 as South Korean competitors move toward HBM4.

That means CXMT could be discarding more than 70% of its production during this early stage, making each usable chip considerably more expensive.

Still, entering HBM production matters strategically. China can design AI accelerators domestically, but without sufficient high-bandwidth memory, those processors cannot deliver their full potential.

CXMT’s challenge is no longer simply developing the technology. It is learning how to manufacture it economically at scale.

(IV) AI Is Creating a New Generation of Chinese Billionaires, But Nobody Wants to Be No. 1

China’s latest Hurun Rich List offers another glimpse of how quickly the AI boom is reshaping the country’s fortunes.

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming leads the ranking with an estimated $99.7 billion, while DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng has climbed to seventh place at $41.7 billion. Unitree founder Wang Xingxing is also on the list, with an estimated fortune of $10.3 billion.

The interesting part is the cultural contrast surrounding these rankings. According to industry accounts, some Chinese entrepreneurs are surprisingly uncomfortable with becoming the country’s richest person, with PR teams reportedly asking organizers to remove their executives from prominent positions on wealth lists.

The attention that comes with being number one can bring unwanted scrutiny, particularly in China, where visibility and wealth do not always make comfortable companions.

AI is creating enormous private fortunes, but being publicly recognized as the person who made them is not necessarily something every founder wants.

(V) The iPhone Duo’s Screen Problem May Start With a Tiny Piece of Metal

The iPhone Duo’s reported screen failures are drawing attention to a familiar problem with foldable devices: the hinge is only as reliable as the mechanical structure supporting the display.

An analysis by the hardware team...

Continue Reading