Julian Lim

Julian Lim · Jul 10, 2026 · 7:00 PM

OpenAI and Google Sold AI Access to Blacklisted Chinese Firms via Singapore

OpenAI and Google have been giving advanced AI model access to Singapore-registered subsidiaries of Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, despite their Chinese parents sitting on the Pentagon's 1260H blacklist. The arrangement is legal, and it's reopening the fight over whether AI export controls should work like chip export controls.

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Julian Lim · Jul 10, 2026 · 3:18 AM

Netflix Proves That Even Streaming's Biggest Winner Cannot Coast on Its Own Success

Netflix has 325 million subscribers and record revenue, but a Wall Street Journal report says slipping engagement has executives weighing live TV channels and outside bundles. From NASA livestreams to a possible World Cup bid, the pivot shows that scale doesn't guarantee attention. Its July 16 earnings call will show whether any of it is working.

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Julian Lim · Jul 10, 2026 · 1:21 AM

What Is a Zero-Knowledge Proof and Why Crypto Runs On It Now

What is a zero-knowledge proof? It's a cryptographic method that lets one party prove a statement is true without revealing any of the underlying data, and it now powers everything from Ethereum's zk-rollups to Zcash's private payments and Worldcoin's identity checks. Here's the plain-English breakdown of how it works and where it's actually being used.

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Julian Lim · Jul 9, 2026 · 10:35 PM

Gauntlet Just Landed Crypto's Biggest Single-Investor Bet From Japan's SBI

Gauntlet closed a $125 million Series C funded entirely by Japan's SBI Holdings, the largest raise yet for the crypto firm that has shifted from pure risk modeling to curating institutional DeFi vaults. The capital will fund expansion into yen and peso stablecoins as SBI deepens its broader crypto bet alongside stakes in Morpho, Ripple, and Circle.

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Julian Lim · Jul 9, 2026 · 4:12 AM

Apple Commits $30 Billion to Broadcom for Chips Made in Colorado

Apple is committing more than $30 billion to Broadcom through 2031 in its largest American Manufacturing Program pledge yet, funding a $1.5 billion expansion of Broadcom's Fort Collins, Colorado facility to build over 15 billion US-made wireless chips. The deal lands as Broadcom separately sits on a $73 billion AI chip backlog, giving Wall Street two reasons to watch the company's order book.

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Julian Lim · Jul 8, 2026 · 7:21 PM

Iluvatar CoreX seeks up to $850 million just as its IPO lockup expires

Shanghai Iluvatar CoreX is raising up to $850 million in Hong Kong just as its IPO lockup expires, capitalizing on a 428% stock rally since January. The deal would push the GPU maker's total public market haul to nearly $1.3 billion as it races Huawei and Cambricon for a share of China's Nvidia-alternative chip market.

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Julian Lim · Jul 7, 2026 · 2:35 PM

A Warsaw VC Firm Just Raised 197 Million Euros for European Defense Tech

Warsaw-based venture firm Expeditions has closed a 197 million euro fund for European defense startups, backed by BAE Systems, the NATO Innovation Fund and early executives from Skype and Wise. The deal shows how defense primes are turning to venture capital instead of building everything in-house.

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Julian Lim · Jul 7, 2026 · 4:45 AM

India and Japan team up to make Indian warships harder for China to detect

India and Japan have signed their first-ever joint defence hardware project, agreeing to build a radar-evading antenna system called UNICORN for Indian warships. The deal comes as India hedges against strain in its relationship with Washington and watches China deepen naval ties with Pakistan.

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Julian Lim · Jul 6, 2026 · 9:36 PM

Trump Rings NYSE Bell From the Oval Office and Says Nobody Understands Bitcoin's Power

The White House keeps replaying Trump's March declaration that Bitcoin is very powerful, even as his own $1.4 billion crypto disclosure fuels a Washington fight over whether he is building policy or a personal portfolio.

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Julian Lim · Jul 6, 2026 · 4:23 AM

Samsung's record AI chip bonus deal is tearing its own union apart

Samsung's $26.6 billion AI chip bonus deal handed memory workers up to $400,000 while phone and appliance staff got roughly $4,000, a 100-to-1 split that triggered 18,000 union defections and a confidence vote against chair Choi Seung-ho. He survived the vote, but the fight over how AI windfalls get shared inside one company is far from over.

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Julian Lim · Jul 5, 2026 · 6:14 PM

Chip stocks tumbled this week as investors doubt the AI spending payoff

Micron, Intel, and AMD led a sharp semiconductor selloff this week after reports that Meta is building a business to resell excess AI compute, reviving doubts about whether hyperscaler AI spending is generating real returns. SK Hynix's HBM slowdown and a more hawkish Federal Reserve compounded the drop, even as TSMC and Nvidia posted offsetting good news.

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Julian Lim · Jul 4, 2026 · 10:00 PM

Modi opens India's first commercial chip packaging plant in Sanand

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated CG Semi's OSAT facility in Sanand, Gujarat on July 4, India's first large-scale commercial chip packaging plant, built with Renesas and Stars Microelectronics under a Rs 7,600 crore joint venture. The plant joins Micron and Kaynes Semicon in a fast-growing Sanand cluster, even as Taiwan and China still dominate the global assembly and test market by a wide margin.

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Julian Lim · Jul 4, 2026 · 6:41 AM

Three nuclear startups beat Trump's deadline and one already powers an Nvidia chip

Three US nuclear startups, Antares Nuclear, Valar Atomics, and Deployable Energy, pushed reactors to criticality ahead of President Trump's July 4, 2026 deadline. Valar went further on July 1, feeding live power from its Ward 250 microreactor into an Nvidia Blackwell chip, but none of the three has a signed offtake deal with a hyperscaler, and their reactors are still far from commercial-scale power.

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Julian Lim · Jul 4, 2026 · 1:50 AM

What VCs Actually Look for in a Pitch Deck, and Why Most Get Rejected

What VCs look for in a pitch deck has less to do with design and more with whether traction, market logic, and team relevance are legible in the first sixty seconds. Most decks get rejected not for a weak product but for burying the one number that proves momentum.

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Julian Lim · Jul 3, 2026 · 6:38 PM

Quantum Systems Raises $1.2 Billion as Airbus Bets on a Future Rival

Quantum Systems raised $1.2 billion at an $8 billion valuation in a Series D co-led by Blackstone, Airbus, Noteus and Advent, more than doubling its worth in a single round. The Munich drone maker says it's already profitable, a rarity in a defense tech sector that just posted a record $17.4 billion funding year. Airbus, one of the primes founder Florian Seibel says Quantum could disrupt, is now also one of its backers.

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Julian Lim · Jul 3, 2026 · 12:26 PM

Sakana AI's Ren Ito Joins the UN's New AI for Good Commission

Ren Ito, co-founder and chairman of Sakana AI, has been named to the UN and ITU's new AI for Good Global Commission just weeks after his company launched Fugu, a system built to match Anthropic's export-restricted Mythos and Fable 5 models. The appointment puts him alongside Jensen Huang, Andy Jassy, and Marc Benioff on a commission meant to address the exact access gap Sakana's product was built to fill.

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