Huawei Technologies expects a major domestic shift towards its artificial intelligence computing infrastructure for model training next year, as its Ascend processors gain ground on Nvidia in China despite supply constraints, according to rotating chairman Eric Xu Zhijun. “I believe that starting from next year, a lot of the AI model training will be based on the SuperPoD or SuperCluster based on Ascend 950DT,” Xu told reporters during the Huawei Connect 2026 conference in Shanghai on...

Gareth Ainsworth believes Gillingham have turned a corner after finally getting the chance to build the team he wanted.

Catch up with all the week’s football fixtures and results here.

A big believer that elite sporting performance is entirely dictated by an athlete’s brain, Greg Koenig is busy convincing Cheung Ka-long that the Asian Games remain an important date in his calendar. Hong Kong’s first fencing superstar, Cheung has been there and done it over the past five years. He brilliantly won a pair of Olympic golds, first as an unfancied underdog, then as the foil king his rivals all wanted to dethrone, either side of becoming Asian Games champion in 2023. Of Cheung’s...

Promotion-chasing Kent wrapped up a seventh County Championship Division 2 victory of the summer in three days against Lancashire.

Athletes from multiple countries arriving in Japan for the 20th Asian Games were stranded at Nagoya airport because of a technical glitch, leaving some Chinese team members stuck for seven hours without food. According to state media, the plane carrying the country’s delegation from Beijing landed on schedule at around 12.15pm, with buses already waiting at Chubu Centrair International Airport to take them to their accommodation. However, athletes and officials soon found themselves trapped at...

Steve Evans will bring his familiar touchline intensity back to Priestfield on Saturday – but Gills boss Gareth Ainsworth says he has his respect.

Gillingham are close to welcoming back several injured players for Saturday’s visit of Bristol Rovers – but striker Ronan Hale remains a doubt.

Gillingham defender Conor McManus has been called up for international duty.

Huawei Technologies on Thursday unveiled a new computing architecture that it says could make as many as 1 million processors work as a single computer, putting its UnifiedBus interconnect technology at the centre of an ambitious effort to rethink how large data centres are built. The Peerium Computing Architecture combines nested parallelism, unified memory addressing and peer-to-peer interconnect, with UnifiedBus serving as the high-speed fabric connecting processors, memory, storage and...

The 20th Asian Games officially get under way in Japan on Saturday, and the honour of leading the Hong Kong delegation into the opening ceremony has been handed to Ivan Yang and Lydia Sham. At a welcome event on Thursday, Wong Po-kee, the chef de mission for Hong Kong’s more than 800-strong delegation, said the pair would be the city’s flag bearers for the event at the Nagoya City Mizuho Park Athletic Stadium. Officials and some of the city’s athletes attended a flag-raising at Nagoya Port...

Hyrox China has given full refunds to competitors affected by last weekend’s incident in Beijing, while the global governing body has updated its rule book to allow race directors to remove athletes if they pose a risk to the hygiene of the event. The commercial fitness competition has faced intense public backlash since elite Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk suffered incontinence during the solo women’s event but was allowed to carry on and win. Her mid-race left track surfaces and shared...

China’s leading memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is gaining ground among local smartphone vendors, with some of its high-end chips finding their way into flagship Chinese handsets as vendors push into the premium market. ZTE-backed Nubia’s NaviX Ultra that went on sale on Wednesday used LPDDR5X DRAM chips from CXMT, the companies announced earlier this month. The handset was dubbed the Nubia Doubao phone due to its integration of TikTok parent ByteDance’s Doubao artificial...

Huawei Technologies said on Thursday that it would launch its next-generation artificial intelligence chip in the first quarter of 2027, moving the target launch forward by nine months as the firm aggressively expands its ecosystem amid China’s self-sufficiency push. David Wang Tao, rotating and acting chairman for Huawei, said on Thursday that the Ascend 960DT chip, an AI chip designed for model training, “with performance doubling”, would be “ready in the first quarter of 2027”, three quarters...

Chinese runner Zhao Jiaju became the first athlete to complete the 330km Tor des Géants in under 66 hours on Wednesday, breaking the course record to claim victory in Italy using a “fragmented sleep” strategy. Wearing bib No 1, he crossed the finish line in Courmayeur at 9.55am with a winning time of 65 hours, 55 minutes and 22 seconds, making history as the first Asian competitor to win the event. Widely regarded as one of the world’s most gruelling ultra-trail races, the flagship event offers...

Gillingham’s youngsters are making such an impression that some of the club’s senior players could find it difficult to win their shirts back.

Huawei Technologies on Thursday unveiled its latest Atlas 960 SuperPoD computing cluster and an upgraded version of its UnifiedBus interconnect technology, key components of the Chinese tech giant’s strategy to build advanced artificial intelligence systems despite US semiconductor-related restrictions. At the Huawei Connect 2026 conference in Shanghai, the Shenzhen-based firm introduced near-packaged optics (NPOs) – a placement structure enabling higher speeds and lower energy use – to the...

Catch up with all the week’s football fixtures and results here.

Kent are closing in on victory in their Rothesay County Championship clash with Lancashire at Canterbury.

China is bracing for a potential massive sell-off of a high-profile artificial intelligence chip stock on Thursday, when a lock-up period affecting 14 million shares in MetaX Integrated Circuits is set to expire. Analysts expect MetaX to face “significant selling pressure” when the restricted shares are released for trading, after the expiry of a similar lock-up period for shares in fellow AI chip firm Moore Threads last week sparked an avalanche of sales that wiped nearly 49 billion yuan...

Hong Kong’s decades-old tennis facilities at Victoria Park will be redeveloped, the city’s leader said on Wednesday, a move that could open the way to holding bigger tournaments in the future. Speaking during his annual Policy Address, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said the plan was “to strengthen the promotion of ‘sports and mega-events’.” At the moment, Hong Kong holds the rights to stage a WTA and an ATP tournament, both at the 250 level. The first of those is the Prudential Hong Kong Open...

China’s Moonshot AI has attracted global investor interest spanning Europe, Asia and the Middle East, people familiar with the matter say, as international capital scrambles for access to Chinese frontier artificial intelligence labs, betting on their high-stakes race against US rivals. The Beijing-based developer of the Kimi family of AI models has seen mounting interest from overseas players ranging from European investment firms to Middle East family offices, with some seeking indirect...

The MoonPay X Games League will hold its inaugural winter draft this week, ⁠betting that a team-based format and ⁠closer ties with the Olympic movement can build on ⁠strong audience growth for action sports, CEO Jeremy Bloom said. Eileen Gu, the most decorated freestyle skier in Olympic history with three golds and three silvers, is expected to be selected first overall. The draft follows the debut of the X Games Summer League, which featured teams representing Los Angeles, New York, Sao Paulo...

More than 750 supporters checked out Gillingham’s new Fan Zone on Saturday as the club looks to enhance the matchday experience at Priestfield.

Gillingham were beaten at home by a ruthless Birmingham City Academy side on Tuesday night in the Premier League Under-21 Cup.

An incredible 17 wickets fell as it proved a day to forget for the batsmen during Kent’s County Championship match with Lancashire at Canterbury.

Gillingham’s manager wants to use Tuesday night’s Premier League Under-21 Cup clash to give some of his returning senior players valuable game-time.

The Chinese Badminton Association has announced, just four days before the start of the Asian Games, that men’s doubles player Chen Boyang had withdrawn because of illness, with He Jiting named as his replacement alongside Liu Yi. On Monday, the association revealed that Chen had suffered a sudden illness. Following consultations between national team doctors and specialists from several hospitals, medical experts confirmed his condition would prevent him from competing. “To protect the...

China is surging ahead of the US in consumer AI adoption as technology giants like Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group Holding embed artificial intelligence directly into popular everyday apps, even as American models lead in capability, according to Morgan Stanley. A survey conducted by the bank and published in a report on Monday showed that 80 per cent of Chinese respondents used AI for personal purposes at least weekly, compared with 54 per cent in the US. China’s generative AI user base grew...

When generative artificial intelligence first swept through China’s technology sector, workers faced a clear directive from management: use AI and use it often. Consuming vast numbers of AI tokens – the basic unit of computing power needed to process text or write code – became a badge of honour, with companies often viewing a high token count as a sign that employees were productive and taking initiative. But those computing allowances are now being sharply rolled back as China’s leading...