Information Technology · Sunday, 30 August 2026

01 Briefing what happened

The US chip tax excused nearly every buyer. The next one may reach laptops and game consoles.

Information Technology 1 min 47 sources

The US government is drafting a second round of taxes on imported chips, eight people told Politico. This one would also tax the machines chips go into. The four groups excused in January - data centres, research labs, startups and everyday devices - may not be excused again.

25%

the US tax on imported chips, set in January

four whole groups of buyers were excused from paying it [3]

unnamed people the whole report rests on

Reuters said it could not confirm any of it [1]

2029

when the first US plant for AI memory chips opens fully

SK Hynix broke ground this week, about a year behind its own plan [6][7]

62.6%

the expected rise in South Korea's exports in August

it would be a 15th straight monthly gain, on AI memory chips [8]

The lead story — what happened

The Trump administration is drafting a second round of taxes on imported chips, eight people told the news site Politico on Thursday. [1][2]
This round would also tax the machines chips go into: laptops, game consoles, and the servers that fill data centres. [1][2][3]
January's tax on imported chips was 25%. Four groups were excused: data centres, research labs, startups and everyday devices. [3]
US Commerce Department officials have said in private talks that those exceptions may not carry over. That is the real change on the table. [3]
Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary, wants each company to bring in only so many chips tax-free, matched to what it has promised to build in America. [1][3]
Reuters could not confirm the report. Neither the Trump administration nor the US Commerce Department answered questions. [1]
A separate rule is being drafted to stop Chinese firms renting American AI chips from a distance, through computers sitting in Thailand and Singapore. [4]
The chip factories all this is meant to reward are years away. SK Hynix, a South Korean memory maker, broke ground in Indiana this week and opens fully in 2029. [6][7]
Chips are the one thing still selling hard. South Korea's exports are expected to be up 62.6% in August, a 15th straight monthly gain. [8]
China is pushing back quietly. It is slowing shipments of germanium and quartz, two materials chip factories need, to Taiwan through customs checks rather than a ban. [5]

Who is involved

Howard Lutnick

the US commerce secretary, the cabinet member in charge of trade; he wants tax relief tied to promised American factory building
The US Commerce Department

the arm of the US government that writes trade and export rules; it is drafting both the chip tax and the remote-renting rule
SK Hynix

a South Korean firm, one of the two biggest makers of the memory chips AI needs; it broke ground in Indiana this week
Data centres, startups and laptop makers

the buyers excused from January's tax; officials have signalled they may not be excused next time

What is pushing on this

Pressure to build in America Building↑

relief from the tax would be tied to what each firm promises to build in the US [1][3]

Ways round the wall High↑

a rule is being drafted to stop Chinese firms renting US chips from Thailand and Singapore [4]

Cost landing on shoppers Building↑

the new round would cover laptops and game consoles, which ordinary people buy [1][2]

Demand for chips High↑

South Korea's exports are expected to be up 62.6% in August, on AI memory [8]

How it unfolded

January a 25% US tax on imported chips, with four groups of buyers excused [3]
May the US trade representative says no new chip taxes are coming soon [1]
Thursday Politico reports a second round covering laptops, consoles and servers [1][2][3]
Friday a separate rule surfaces, aimed at renting chips from abroad [4]
September the US Commerce Department may show that rule to trade groups [4]

Where this points

Watch the list of exceptions, not the rate. If data centres and startups lose their place on it, the same 25% becomes a far bigger tax. [3]

The rest of the day

26 more stories on this beat.

Each with its own sources. None of these is a link to the story above.

02
Rule drafted on renting chips from abroad

The US Commerce Department is drafting a rule to stop Chinese firms using American AI chips from a distance, through computers in Thailand and Singapore. It may go to trade groups in September. [4]

Why it matters — US export rules cover chips that physically move. Renting the machine from far away has never been covered.
03
Tencent gives away a large new model

Tencent, China's biggest games and messaging company, released a preview of Hy4, a free-to-download AI model for coding, research and financial work. It holds 770 billion learned numbers and uses about 49 billion on any one request. [13]

Why it matters — A model anyone can download runs wherever chips already are, which is the one place a wall around chips cannot reach.
04
Z.ai names itself behind Ox Alpha

Z.ai, an AI lab in Beijing, confirmed it built Ox Alpha, a coding and reasoning model, and published the model's weights on Wednesday. It argued China's open approach is safer than Silicon Valley's closed one. [14][15]

Why it matters — Weights are the learned numbers inside a model. Publish them and nobody needs permission to use it.
05
Money pours into give-it-away AI

Nvidia, which makes the chips AI runs on, struck a $6bn deal with Poolside, a builder of free-to-download models. Two weeks ago the payments firm Stripe bought OpenRouter, which resells such models to businesses, for over $7bn. [16]

Why it matters — Nvidia told investors the US government may restrict Chinese-built AI, and is tuning its hardware for Chinese models anyway. [17]
06
8.7m airport customers' details taken

Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports said hackers reached data on about 8.7 million customers, mostly wifi sign-ups and car-park bookings. Emails, phone numbers, car registrations and postcodes were taken. [18]

Why it matters — The airports' owner said the hacked system held no payment details and flights were not affected.
07
Judge: blacklisting Anthropic was unlawful

A California district judge ruled that the US defence department's blacklisting of the AI firm Anthropic was unconstitutional. Judge Rita Lin wrote that national security is "not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics". [19]

Why it matters — Anthropic had set limits on military uses of its systems, and the court called the response unlawful retaliation.
08
First US plant for AI memory breaks ground

SK Hynix held a groundbreaking in West Lafayette, Indiana for a $4bn site that will assemble and test AI memory chips. Full production starts in the second half of 2029, about a year later than first planned. [6][7]

Why it matters — The tax plan rewards promised American building, and the building takes years.
09
Two arrested over poisoned code packages

Australian police charged two men, aged 21 and 23, over a group that hid harmful code inside widely used free software tools. Police said it reached more than 1,000 organisations and 500,000 stolen passwords. [22]

Why it matters — Most software is assembled from other people's parts, so one poisoned part travels everywhere at once.
10
FBI seizes China-linked hacking platforms

The FBI, the US federal police, seized two platforms it says a China-backed group called QTFY used against NASA, the US energy department and the US Senate. Court papers name a private firm in Nanjing paid by China's Ministry of State Security. [23]

Why it matters — The tools were rented out to other criminals as a hiding service, which makes any single attack hard to trace.
11
Insurers rewrite cover for AI that acts alone

The insurers MSIG, QBE and Beazley are redrafting cyber policies for software that acts without a human telling it to, eight executives said. Separately, Russian-speaking criminals used the coding assistant Cursor to break into seven firms. [24][25]

Why it matters — Nobody has settled whether a machine that decides for itself counts as an attacker in a policy.
12
Google changes EU spam rules to dodge a fine

From 30 August Google will stop pushing sites down its search results by hand across the 27 EU countries plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein. Publishers had complained and the European Commission had opened a case. [20]

Why it matters — Breaking the EU's Digital Markets Act, which limits what the biggest tech firms may do, can cost up to 10% of worldwide sales.
13
Google pays 260m pounds to UK app developers

Google agreed to settle a London claim over the cut it takes from Play Store sales for 260 million pounds, about $353m, with no admission of wrongdoing. The claim had been valued at over 1 billion pounds. [21]

Why it matters — It is the fourth such UK case against a big tech company since the start of 2025, after Apple, Qualcomm and Sony.
14
Spain: green power every hour, or no grid link

Spain plans to make new data centres match 80% of their power with renewables hour by hour, rather than averaged across a year. Every new megawatt needs matching generation in place within 18 months. [26][27]

Why it matters — Hourly matching means the clean power has to exist at the moment the servers draw it.
15
Britain moves to clear phantom data centres

Ofgem, Britain's energy regulator, proposed making data-centre developers pay a large non-refundable deposit and line up customers before joining the queue for a grid connection. Industry feedback closes in September. [28]

Why it matters — The queue has filled with projects that will never be built, delaying the ones that will.
16
Gas plants for data centres nearly double

Global Energy Monitor tracks US power plants. It says gas projects tied to data centres have grown from 97 gigawatts at the end of 2025 to over 189 gigawatts by mid-2026. One gigawatt powers roughly a million homes. [45]

Why it matters — The US is now building twice as much gas-fired power as China, after a 76% rise in projects under construction. [46]
17
California exempts free operating systems from age checks

California's senate passed AB 1856 by 39 votes to nil, taking freely copyable operating systems out of the state's Digital Age Assurance Act. Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch and SteamOS fall outside it. [29]

Why it matters — The original law would have made volunteer projects collect users' ages the way Apple and Microsoft do.
18
OpenAI publishes its first chip numbers

At Hot Chips, a chip industry conference, OpenAI showed test results for Jalapeno, a chip it designed itself for answering questions rather than for training models. It ships in very small volumes at the end of 2026. [30][31]

Why it matters — Its biggest customers building their own chips is part of why Nvidia is buying into the model layer.
19
AI memory eats three times the factory

Micron, a US memory maker, told Hot Chips that the stacked memory AI needs uses about three times the silicon area of ordinary computer memory for the same capacity. The gap is widening. [9]

Why it matters — Ordinary memory contract prices rose 90% to 95% in the first quarter, and building more factories adds less supply than the count suggests. [9]
20
Three more organisations disclose breaches

Boston Scientific, a medical device maker, told the US markets regulator that an attack disrupted operations worldwide including order shipping. Its shares fell 3.5% before the open. [38][39]

Why it matters — The ATF, the US agency that polices guns and explosives, declared a major incident, and the $1tn investment firm Apollo confirmed a break-in. [40][41]
21
Uber faces a near-$1bn Dutch fine

The Dutch data regulator fined Uber nearly $1bn over driver accounts switched off by software with too little human review. Its deputy chair said a computer should not make decisions with such consequences. [32]

Why it matters — Uber says it will appeal, and that permanent removals do get human review.
22
Zillow and Redfin settle with the FTC

Zillow and Redfin, two US property-listing sites, settled with the US competition regulator and five states on the morning their trial was due to begin. The regulator said Zillow paid Redfin $100m not to compete on rental listings. [36][37]

Why it matters — The arrangement could have kept Redfin out of rental advertising for as long as nine years.
23
Two governments bill two platforms

Poland asked the European Commission to fine Meta 250 million euros. Its national cyber team flagged 122 fraudulent adverts; Meta removed 10 and refused to remove 106. [34] Brazil sued the chat app Discord for $97m over child-safety failures. [35]

Why it matters — Both cases are about adverts and chats the platforms are meant to police themselves.
24
Amazon shuts its human-task marketplace

Amazon will close Mechanical Turk on 30 September, 21 years after launch. It matched workers with tiny digital jobs paying a few cents, which Jeff Bezos once called artificial artificial intelligence. [33]

Why it matters — It existed for tasks that are easy for people and hard for computers, and that gap has narrowed.
25
Self-hosted email halves in a decade

In 2016, 44.6% of the million most popular web domains ran their own mail server. In 2026 that is 22.4%. Google Workspace now handles 21.8% and Microsoft 365 handles 16.8%. [47]

Why it matters — Two companies now carry 38.6% of the mail for the busiest domains on the internet.
26
More factories promised, none finished

Sandisk and Kioxia agreed a fresh joint investment in their Japanese flash-memory plants. [11] Intel said fault rates on its next chip-making process are falling faster than planned, and Xiaomi's new phone chip is made by TSMC in Taiwan. [10][12]

Why it matters — Everyone is committing to build, which is exactly what the tax plan proposes to reward.
27
The money kept moving

Nvidia is in talks to invest in the AI search firm Perplexity at over $30bn. The AI startup Instinct raised $350m at a $2.5bn valuation, and the robot maker Generalist reached $3bn. [42][43][44]

Why it matters — Perplexity's yearly revenue has gone from under $250m to over $750m since January. [42]

02 Lesson why it matters

The rate is the announcement. The exception list is the rule.

A tax everyone can name is really set by a list almost nobody reads, and that list can be shortened without anyone announcing it.

The twist

The exceptions are not holes in a rule. They are what it cost to get the rule made - and unlike the headline number, they can be shortened without an announcement.

How it works

A big rule is announced with one number
The buyers it would hurt most ask to be excused
They go on a list of exceptions, and the rule passes
The number gets reported; the list does not
Later the list is shortened, and the rule finally bites

Where you've seen this

Insurance

the price is advertised; the list of what is not covered decides whether you get paid

A free bank account

the schedule of fees at the back is the actual price

A school phone ban

the exceptions decide whether anything in the corridor changes

Speed limits

the posted number and the margin police actually act on are two different rules

The catch

Exceptions are often honest and needed. A rule written with none can do more harm than the problem it was aimed at. The trouble is that they are written where nobody looks.

And the whole of it

Nobody hid anything here. The exemptions were published, the companies asked to be excused in the open, and reporters wrote up the number because a number fits in a headline. Most of us can name the rate of every rule we live under, and the list attached to almost none of them.

03 Truth what's really going on

What is really going on

The 25% chip tax excused almost everyone who actually buys chips, so the real fight is over the list of exceptions, not the rate.

Why it works on us — One percentage is easy to remember and easy to report, so a rule gets judged on the one part of it that was never doing the work.

Who gains

Chipmakers already building in America — Lutnick's plan would cap tax-free imports at a volume tied to promised US production, so relief tracks what a firm has already committed to. SK Hynix's Indiana site has $458m in finalised US grants and up to $500m in loans behind it. [1][3][6]
Nvidia — Its biggest customers are designing their own chips, so it is buying into the model layer instead: a $6bn deal with Poolside, and hardware tuned for Chinese models. [16][17][30]
Chinese labs giving models away — Tencent and Z.ai both published free models this week, and a downloadable model runs on whatever chips a buyer already has. [13][14][15]
Google and Microsoft — Self-hosted email fell from 44.6% of the million most popular domains in 2016 to 22.4% in 2026, and the two of them now carry 38.6% of it. [47]

Who pays

People buying a laptop or a games console — The proposed round covers finished products, and a tax on a finished product is paid at the till. [1][2][3]
Startups and research labs — They are on January's list of exceptions, and US Commerce Department officials have signalled the list may not carry over. [3]
Taiwanese optics and chip-equipment firms — China is slowing germanium and quartz shipments to the island through customs delays, and some firms are losing orders while they wait. [5]
8.7 million airport customers — Their emails, phone numbers, car registrations and postcodes were taken from wifi and car-park systems. [18]

What nobody knows yet

Open questions from across today’s stories — ours included.

01

Whether any of this becomes policy at all.

The plan rests on eight unnamed people speaking to the news site Politico. Reuters said it could not confirm the report, and nobody in the US government would comment. [1][2]
02

Which of January's exceptions survive.

US Commerce Department officials have only said in private talks that data centres, research labs, startups and everyday devices may not carry over. Nothing has been published. [3]
03

Whether the US government can legally control renting chips from abroad.

Tom's Hardware reports that questions remain about the US Commerce Department's authority to write such a rule, and no text of it has been published. [4]
04

What share of chip imports each excused group represents.

Nobody has published the split, so nobody outside the US Commerce Department can say how much January's tax actually collected.
05

How good Tencent's new model really is.

The claims come from Tencent's own release post, which also says the model can be slow and can over-check its own answers. [13]
06

Who attacked the three UK airports, and how much was taken.

Manchester Airports Group says about 8.7 million customers were affected and that no payment details were held. It has not named who did it. [18]
07

Whether Intel's progress on its next chip-making process holds.

The claim came from Intel's finance chief at an investor conference, and mass production is still about two years away. [10]
08

How much gas-fired power the data-centre boom will really need.

Global Energy Monitor counts over 189 gigawatts announced or under construction, but announced projects routinely fall away and the count does not say how many will be built. [45][46]

04 Hope carry this

California's senate voted 39 to nil this week to take freely copyable operating systems out of the state's new age-check law. Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and SteamOS are built largely by unpaid volunteers, and now none of them has to collect anybody's date of birth.