Nvidia has sharply reduced its AI chip sales network in Asia to block indirect exports to China. The company has cut its list of approved Asian distributors and buyers to about half and is applying new screening standards in Japan, Singapore and Malaysia. More than half of existing buyers are no longer approved, though they can reapply after meeting requirements. Nvidia is conducting on-site data centre inspections, contract checks and user interviews, with U.S. Commerce Department oversight reported.

Alibaba Group Holding\'s research arm DAMO Academy unveiled an AI agent, Elements Clo, designed to discover superconducting materials. DAMO said the system identified four previously unreported candidate compounds and verified them in experiments. It said the model was trained on 125 million molecular and crystal structures and uses a specialised foundation model with 1 billion parameters. DAMO said it screened about 2.4 million stable crystal structures in 28 GPU hours and narrowed them to about 68,000 candidates.