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Topics: RISC-V• Intel• Arm•

Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Semiconductor Edition

Three months after Softbank announced its acquisition of Arm in 2016, Masa Son (founder and CEO of Softbank) invited Jensen Huang (founder and CEO of Nvidia) for dinner at his California mansion. Just the two of them. Among the many things they talked about

Topics: Alibaba• Charlie Munger• Open Source•

Charlie Munger’s New Favorite: Alibaba

It has been more than 440 days since Jack Ma’s infamous speech at the 2020 Bund Finance Summit. (We have the full speech translated in English, Chinese, and Japanese. It’s worth a read.) Since the speech, Alibaba’s stock tumbled by more

Topics: Semiconductor• TSMC• Morris Chang•

Morris Chang's Last Speech

Today’s post is the translation of a speech Morris Chang delivered on the history and future of TSMC and the semiconductor industry at large in April. Chang is the founder and two-time CEO of TSMC, now 90-years-old and retired. The audience of the

Topics: ByteDance• Entrepreneurship• TikTok•

Zhang Yiming’s Last Speech

We rarely do translations on Interconnected, because this newsletter is focused on original work and thinking. Today’s post is an exception – an English translation of a Zhang Yiming speech delivered at the ByteDance company annual all-hands meeting in March 2021, and his last

Topics: Big Data• Databricks• Cloud Industry•

What Does Databricks Do?

Today’s post is a guest contribution from Shawn Xu [https://www.linkedin.com/in/shengyangxu/] (no relations). Shawn is one of the early engineers at Ascend.io, got his Masters in Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon, and writes an informative WeChat public

Topics: Low Code No Code• Developer• VC•

Low Code No Code, Part II: How to Ride This Wave

This post is a guest contribution from Shawn Xu [https://www.linkedin.com/in/shengyangxu/] (no relations). Shawn is one of the early engineers at Ascend.io, got his Masters in Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon, and writes an informative WeChat public account

Topics: Industrial Planning• Semiconductor• Top Articles•

Can the US “Out China” China?

The passage of the US Innovation and Competition Act [https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/06/08/senate-china-science-technology/] by the US Senate last week generated a lot of media attention. It’s a unique piece of news in that it’s newsworthy both as

Topics: Low Code No Code• Developer• Guest Post•

Low Code No Code, Part I: Use Cases and Landscape

This post is a guest contribution from Shawn Xu (no relations). Shawn is one of the early engineers at Ascend.io, got his Masters in Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon, and writes an informative WeChat public account on SaaS called 硅谷成长攻略. (The audio

Topics: TSMC• Semiconductor• Morris Chang•

Morris Chang, Global Semiconductor Competition, Make “Making Stuff” Cool

(The audio version of this post can be found on the Interconnected YouTube channel [https://www.youtube.com/c/Interconnected_newsletter]): Morris Chang, the founder and two-time CEO of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC), gave an hour-long speech [https://mp.weixin.qq.com/

Topics: Semiconductor• China• Top Articles•

China's “Semiconductor Theranos”: HSMC

(The audio version of this post can be found on the Interconnected YouTube channel [https://www.youtube.com/c/Interconnected_newsletter]): China’s semiconductor ambition just had its first ponzi scheme fully exposed: Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing [http://en.hsmc.com/] (HSMC). The HSMC

Topics: Agora• Developer• Global by Nature•

What Does Agora ($API) Do?

(An audio, live-discussion version of this post can be found on the Interconnected YouTube channel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQy-ndAj3nY&t=2s]): Agora is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company for developers to build apps with real-time audio and video capabilities. As a

Topics: Antitrust• Alibaba• Google•

Google, Alibaba, Global Antitrust Standard

People love a “missing billionaire” story, even when there isn’t one. That’s what many Western media outlets and some “Substack experts” have been hotly discussing lately: “Where is Jack Ma?” As Alibaba’s stock price gyrates, all this reminds me of was

Topics: Alibaba• Antitrust• Top Articles•

Alibaba and Antitrust with Chinese Characteristics

I had planned to take time off during this Christmas week and enjoy the rustic island of Moloka‘i. But the announcement of an antitrust probe on Alibaba, dropped on Christmas Eve (and consequently dropped Alibaba’s stock price by 13%), is too interesting

Topics: Developer• Global by Nature• Top Articles•

Global by Nature (Part I): Developers

I write Interconnected as a place to help me think and a space for anyone to think with me. One of the big themes I’ve been thinking about is what will the next phase of globalization look like and what kind of people,

Topics: Jack Ma• Alibaba• IPO•

Jack Ma's Bund Finance Summit Speech

Below is my unofficial translation of Jack Ma’s speech on October 24 at the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai based on a Chinese transcript [https://sfl.global/news_post/mayunshanghaiwaitanjinrongluntanyanjiangquanwenwushanjian/] , with minor edits for clarity and speechification. To read some of my deep

Topics: Huawei• Open Source• China•

300 Years: Huawei's Open Source Strategy

Lost in the fog of TikTok was an important announcement: Huawei open sourced its homemade mobile operating system, HarmonyOS, now dubbed OpenHarmony. This announcement flew under the radar, but has far-reaching implications to not just the future of mobile technology, but also how that

Topics: Open Source• China• Gitee•

Can You "Nationalize" Open Source?

The impending ban or acquisition of TikTok and ByteDance’s lawsuit against the Trump administration have sucked up all the oxygen in the US-China tech zeitgeist. A gigantic IPO, possibly the largest in the world, by Ant Financials is also looming on the horizon.

Topics: Cloud Industry• Alibaba• Tencent•

Where Can the Chinese Internet Go?

With all the executive orders, CFIUS edicts, and additional sanctions placed on Chinese tech companies by the US, it’s hard to see where these companies - and by extension the Chinese Internet - can expand to. Certainly, China’s own economy will continue

Topics: ByteDance• Regulation• Open Source•

A Framework to (Dis)trust and Verify TikTok

Last week, the New York Times tech columnist, Kevin Roose, wrote a well-reasoned piece [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/26/technology/tiktok-china-ban-model.html] arguing that the U.S. government should not ban TikTok, but use it as an example and opportunity to build

Topics: Tesla• China• Semiconductor•

Tesla, China, the “Tech Cold-War”

Tesla may well be the biggest driver of China’s journey towards technological self-reliance, as the “Tech Cold War” between the U.S. and China deepens. This observation wasn’t obvious to me until I listened (three times) to Elon Musk’s Q&

Topics: RISC-V• China• Open Source•

RISC-V, China, Nightingales

Last weekend, I read a long, epic piece of techlore [https://www.huxiu.com/article/360061.html] that chronicled the fierce and bitter rivalry between TSMC and Samsung in their fight to become the world’s number 1 chip foundry, which stretched back three

Topics: ByteDance• Open Source• China•

Can ByteDance Build Trust?

As I noted in Interconnected Weekly, [https://interconnected.blog/june-14-2020-interconnected-weekly/] the most interesting news item from last week was the revelation that ByteDance [https://en.pingwest.com/a/6875] is cutting its China-based engineers data access to TikTok and its other international products, reported

Topics: Meta• Geopolitics• Zoom•

Why Write A Bilingual English-Chinese Newsletter

It’s been three months since I published my first post on Interconnected. Since then, I’ve been writing articles on a wide range of technology and business topics [https://interconnected.blog/popular-topics/], twice a week in both English and Chinese. In this post,

Topics: Cloud Industry• COVID-19• Stock Market•

Is the Cloud Recession-Proof?

Two weeks into the first Wall Street earnings season that includes COVID-19 data, most big tech companies that operate a large cloud unit have reported results. Judging from the growth rate and revenue numbers alone, the cloud seems to be weathering the coronavirus storm

Topics: Zoom• Oracle• Cloud Industry•

Why Zoom Chose Oracle

Zoom picked Oracle as a new cloud provider [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/15/oracles-larry-ellison-calls-zoom-an-essential-service.html] . This news caught some people by surprise [https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/28/in-surprise-choice-zoom-hitches-wagon-to-oracle-for-growing-infrastructure-needs/] . In hindsight, there are signs that this agreement was in the works, aggressively