China's CXMT flips to $11.5B profit as memory prices ride the AI wave

Two stories that put the AI boom's hard infrastructure on the front page: a Chinese memory chipmaker just printed its first massive profit, and an AI-powered brand-protection tool has booted a popular open-source game off Google Play with a takedown that doesn't even name a single infringing asset.

CXMT, China's largest memory chipmaker, reported roughly $22.4 billion in H1 revenue and about $11.5 billion in profit — more than double its full-year 2025 sales and a sharp reversal from a year-ago loss. The numbers, reported by Bloomberg, confirm what memory buyers have been saying for months: AI-driven demand for HBM and high-density DRAM has finally turned China's domestic memory champion into a real cash machine. The story matters because CXMT is the only credible Chinese alternative to Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, and the HBM market is one of the tightest chokepoints in the entire AI build-out. A profitable CXMT means Beijing's chip self-sufficiency push just got its strongest commercial proof point — and a second source for the world's hottest memory category. The catch: U.S. export controls still keep the most advanced HBM out of CXMT's hands, so this profit is mostly standard DRAM and DDR5 riding a price upcycle, not a true HBM breakthrough.

Luanti, the open-source voxel game engine formerly known as Minetest, was pulled from Google Play after a DMCA takedown notice generated by Tracer.AI, an AI-driven brand-protection service used by Microsoft's Mojang. The notice claimed Luanti was shipping copyrighted Minecraft assets but did not name a single asset, file, or texture — Luanti ships with no games or assets at all, only an engine that loads community-uploaded content. This is the latest in a string of bogus AI-generated copyright claims that have hit open-source projects with no resources to fight back, and it shows a real-world failure mode of agentic enforcement: a model files a confident-looking legal notice, a platform complies automatically, and the burden falls on the victim to file a counter-notice and wait out a 46-day clock. The takeaway isn't that brand-protection AI is bad — it's that platforms still treat AI-generated notices as trustworthy by default, and open-source maintainers pay the price.

What to watch: whether Google's counter-notice process restores Luanti quickly, and whether Microsoft/Mojang or Tracer.AI acknowledge that an AI agent should not be filing legal notices without human verification.

If your open-source project can be taken down by an AI you don't employ, who is on the hook when the takedown is wrong?

Akhetonics says its all-optical CPU reaches a customer in 2026

Light-based computing keeps promising more than it delivers — but one Munich startup has just put a date on its bet, and the interview laying it out is doing the rounds on Hacker News this week. Akhetonics says it will deploy its first commercial machine with a major customer by the end of 2026, with several more planned for 2027. The company, founded by Michael Kissner and Leonardo Del Bino, is building a computer where data enters as light, is switched as light, and circulates through memory

The Week in AI — October 5–11, 2026

Every big claim this week turned out to rest on fine print more interesting than the headline: revenue only the company reporting it can define, safety tests sandboxed while the product keeps the web, and a Pentagon phase-out nobody would confirm until reporters kept asking. The week's top 5 1. OpenAI's revenue was $20 billion below the numbers everyone quoted — and the gap was definitional. The Financial Times reported Thursday that OpenAI's annualized revenue runs roughly $20 billion unde

Drone strike shuts a third Yandex data center, taking YandexGPT offline

Russia's largest tech company is learning what the AI era's infrastructure war looks like from the receiving end — three data centers in four days, and with them much of the cloud layer Russian businesses run on. A Ukrainian drone strike knocked out Yandex's data center in Vladimir early Sunday morning, the third of the company's facilities hit since October 8. The site — reported at roughly 50 MW and designed for about 2,880 server racks — stopped operating completely after the attack, Yandex

Agent teams cost up to 5x more, barely score higher

The multi-agent hype train hit a benchmark this weekend — and the grid and the trucking regulators had quiet weeks of their own. Vals AI put agent teams head-to-head with single agents on its Vibe Code Bench, and the teams cost between 1.8 and 5.1 times more for almost no extra quality. The evals company ran GPT-6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5 solo and in teams across 50 apps at two reasoning efforts; out of four comparisons, only one was statistically significant — Sol at medium effort, where the t

Read more

Akhetonics says its all-optical CPU reaches a customer in 2026

The Week in AI — October 5–11, 2026

Drone strike shuts a third Yandex data center, taking YandexGPT offline

Agent teams cost up to 5x more, barely score higher