It’s not every day you see China’s usually poker-faced President crack a tech joke, especially one about backdoors.
But that’s exactly what Xi Jinping did when he handed a pair of Xiaomi smartphones to South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung today, in the middle of a summit otherwise packed with trade tension, Trump, and tight smiles.
The clip, now doing laps across Chinese and Korean social media, shows Lee grinning as he asks, “Is the line secure?”
Xi, without missing a beat, chuckles and replies through his interpreter:
“You can check if there’s a backdoor.”
Both leaders burst out laughing, an unexpectedly human moment amid a week of diplomatic chest-thumping.
The timing was delicious.
Washington’s still obsessed with Chinese tech espionage, regularly floating claims that Huawei and others sneak “backdoors” into their gear – accusations Beijing denies.
Meanwhile, the US has quietly flirted with the same idea, discussing ways to embed its own access points into chips and cloud infrastructure. The pot, it seems, is still calling the kettle compromised.
Markets loved the moment almost as much as social media did.
Xiaomi shares climbed more than 4% in Hong Kong, helped by strong EV sales data but no doubt fuelled by the presidential spotlight.
Amazon bets on ChatGPT’s appetite
Across the Pacific, Amazon decided it’s better to feed the AI beast than fight it.
The tech giant’s cloud arm, AWS, inked a jaw-dropping US$38 billion deal with OpenAI, a seven-year arrangement to supply hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips to power ChatGPT’s insatiable compute habit.
Amazon shares jumped 4.5% last night, Nvidia added 3%, and suddenly the cloud business looked like the hottest property in tech again.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is on what can only be described as a trillion-dollar hardware binge.
Between deals with Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and now Amazon, it’s locking up every data centre that can hum.
Whether that’s strategic brilliance or a bubble with a GPU fetish is anyone’s guess, but for now, the AI gold rush is still minting money.
