September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
Japan's second-quarter growth reaches an annualised 1.4 per cent in the Cabinet Office revision
The Cabinet Office's second preliminary estimate puts April-June real growth at 0.4 per cent on the quarter, an annualised 1.4 per cent. Nikkei Asia reported that this revises the first estimate of 0.3 per cent and 1.1 per cent. Business investment fell 0.9 per cent on the quarter and private consumption was unchanged at 0.0 per cent.
Japan’s wage growth reaches its highest level since 1997
Japan’s total cash earnings rose 4.7 per cent from a year earlier in July, while inflation-adjusted real earnings increased 2.4 per cent. Nominal wage growth was the fastest in nearly three decades, but the gap between the two rates shows that the gain in household purchasing power was smaller. Bloomberg also framed the result as relevant to the BoJ rate path.
Mate XT 2 carries Huawei's on-device model support for 30 billion parameters
Huawei introduced the tri-fold Mate XT 2 with its Kirin 9050 Pro. The company says the chip's neural processor can run an on-device multimodal mixture-of-experts model with 30 billion total parameters. HarmonyOS 7 also moves the Xiaoyi assistant and tools intended to detect AI-altered voices into the system layer, while the numerical performance claims remain independently untested.
Matt Clifford gives up ARIA chair after taking Anthropic role
Matt Clifford said he will leave the chair of Britain's high-risk research agency ARIA, five days after starting a full-time job at Anthropic. Parliamentary committee chair Chi Onwurah had called the two roles a clear conflict of interest. Clifford will manage the transition until 6 November, putting the boundary between public research governance and private AI companies under scrutiny.
Meta's ad review let more than 250 new AI child abuse ads through since August
Researchers at the Tech Transparency Project counted more than 250 further advertisements carrying child sexual abuse material on Meta's platforms since the start of August. The company removed about 50 such ads last month. The total since late last year passes 350. Some of the new ads use photographs of real children.
Mistral completes a 3 billion euro Series D led by Samsung
In a Series D led by Samsung Electronics, Mistral said it had raised 3 billion euros at a valuation above 21 billion euros. Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity co-led; Advent, BlackRock funds and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg joined as new investors. Mistral says the money goes to frontier research, compute and infrastructure. The company describes the round as the largest equity fundraising completed by a European technology company and says it serves more than 125 enterprises in 20 countries, among them Airbus, ASML and HSBC.
OpenAI becomes the anchor customer at two Firmus factories in Malaysia
The Australian data centre company Firmus said it had signed a multi-year agreement with OpenAI. OpenAI becomes the anchor customer by contracting dedicated compute at two sites in Malaysia, taking Firmus contracted capacity above 900 MW. Two of seven sites are operating and five are under development; the company aims to bring them into service within 24 months. According to the announcement the sites use Nvidia Vera Rubin hardware and the HyperCube rig made in New South Wales.
OpenAI's Navier-Stokes Millennium claim rests on a proof outsiders have not seen
OpenAI said 1,000 agents found Euler blow-ups in 50 hours and 10,000 agents extended them to Navier-Stokes in 11 hours, at a customer cost of about 15 million dollars. The Clay prize is 1 million dollars. Nature and Quanta Magazine date the same announcement to 8 September; the proof was checked in Lean, though New Scientist wrote that nobody outside has seen it.
Palantir names Nebius its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner
Palantir and Nebius said on Tuesday that Nebius is Palantir's preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner. After an integration period, Nebius compute and inference endpoints are to be brought inside the Palantir perimeter. The joint announcement gives no timeline or capacity figures.
Putin and Trump hold an hour-long call after the Witkoff and Kushner visits
Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said Putin and Trump held a constructive and candid hour-long call in which Trump stressed ending the war in Ukraine and Putin said Russia has no aggressive plans towards Europe. The White House issued no immediate account of its own. The call followed Witkoff and Kushner's visits on 5 and 6 September.