Apple is reportedly asking the Trump administration for clearance to buy RAM chips from ChangXin Memory Technologies, according to Financial Times reporting summarized by The Verge. CXMT appears on the Pentagon’s Section 1260H list of Chinese military companies, but The Verge reported that Apple is not legally barred from buying the chips.
The Department of Defense’s public list names ChangXin Memory Technologies, and a June 2026 Federal Register notice says CXMT is affiliated with MIIT and indirectly affiliated with SASAC and MIIT. The Verge reported that the administration had not decided whether to approve Apple’s request, and the article did not include a public Apple statement or U.S. approval notice.
Featured source: The Verge , Financial Times , Department of Defense , Federal Register .
Other Stories
Octopus and CATL announce European truck battery-swapping venture
Octopus Energy and CATL formed Swaptopus, a joint venture to build battery-swapping hubs for electric trucks in the UK and Europe. TechRadar reported that the first large hubs are expected in the UK in 2027 and that more than 30 are planned across Europe by 2035, while Octopus said the network could support more than 300,000 electric trucks and unlock over GBP30 billion of private investment.
Filed from: TechRadar , Octopus Energy .
NPCI chief says AI will be involved in next phase of UPI growth
TechCrunch reported that National Payments Corporation of India CEO Dilip Asbe said AI could be used in India’s digital payments system if regulation and user-consent frameworks are in place. Asbe said payment systems should protect users, mitigate risk, and be able to review instructions and consent if an agent-driven payment goes wrong; the report also said NPCI’s FIMI model is serving more than a million users for mandate cancellations and dispute resolution.
Filed from: TechCrunch .
Apple Vision Pro executive reportedly leaves for OpenAI
TechCrunch reported that Paul Meade, the Apple vice president in charge of the Vision Pro headset, is leaving Apple to join OpenAI’s hardware team, citing Bloomberg. The report said Meade also led development of Apple’s planned AI-powered smart glasses, and the article did not include public confirmation from Apple or OpenAI.
Filed from: TechCrunch , 9to5Mac .
SoftBank CEO questions orbital AI data centers
TechCrunch reported that SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son argued at a shareholder meeting that putting AI data centers in space would not meaningfully cut costs and would take too long for the current AI infrastructure race. Fortune and Business Insider also reported Son’s cost argument that electricity is only about 7 percent of AI infrastructure expense, with chips and other costs making up the rest.
Filed from: TechCrunch , Fortune , Business Insider .
From the Community
Anonymous researcher publishes undisclosed zero-day exploits on GitHub
An anonymous GitHub account released a repository containing proof-of-concept exploits for multiple undisclosed vulnerabilities in widely used open-source projects, including c-ares, FFmpeg, libssh2, and Firefox. The author stated that the vulnerabilities had not been reported to vendors and encouraged others to submit them for CVE assignment.
Filed from: GitHub .
AMD Strix Halo RDMA cluster setup guide for distributed vLLM inference
A guide details how to configure a two-node AMD Strix Halo cluster connected by Intel E810 100GbE RDMA for distributed vLLM inference with Tensor Parallelism. The setup uses Fedora 43, RoCE v2, and a custom toolbox container with a patched ROCm communication library, and the guide reports approximately 5-microsecond latency between nodes.
Filed from: GitHub .
Ford rehires hundreds of engineers after AI quality-control effort
The Independent reported that Ford rehired more than 350 veteran engineers after its AI-driven quality-control systems failed to deliver expected results. The report said Ford’s quality improved afterward, with the company ranking first among mainstream brands in the latest J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey for the first time in 16 years.
Filed from: The Independent .
Wayfinder Router provides deterministic offline LLM query routing
Wayfinder Router is a CLI tool that routes prompts between local and hosted LLMs by analyzing prompt structure and wording without calling another model. It scores prompt complexity in microseconds, runs offline, requires no API key or network, and supports OpenAI-compatible APIs.
Filed from: GitHub .
Bashblog is a single Bash script for static blogs
Bashblog is a minimal blogging tool that runs from a single Bash script without installation, dependencies, or a database. It generates static HTML pages and RSS feeds, and supports Markdown, drafts, tags, and Disqus comments.
Filed from: GitHub .
Nourish publishes a Wayland compositor with infinite zoom and pan
Nourish is a Linux desktop environment built on a Wayland compositor with an infinite zoomable and pannable viewport. It uses Vulkan rendering, supports fractional scaling, and its underlying y5 engine is written in Rust with patched forks of smithay, bevy, wgpu, and iced.
Filed from: GitHub .
