Quick notes: Billionaire Raj | BYD Seagull...

• Billionaire Raj: India's richest 1% earn 22.6% of total income — the highest share since data going back to the 1920s — and hold more than 40% of the wealth.
  
  The inequality gap widened after the economy’s opening up in the early 1990s, but “between 2014-15 and 2022-23, the rise of top-end inequality has been particularly pronounced in terms of wealth concentration”. “The ‘Billionaire Raj’ headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces”.



• “Extinction-level event for the U.S. auto sector”: Why a small China-made EV has global auto execs and politicians on edge.
  
  The China-built BYD Seagull, a small all-electric hatchback, starts at less than $10,000, and reportedly banks a profit for the Chinese automaker. That latter point — EV profits where U.S. automakers have mostly failed to turn any — combined with the expansion of Chinese automakers into Europe, Latin America and elsewhere has automotive executives and politicians, from Detroit and Texas to Germany and Japan, on edge.
  
  The rise of BYD and other Chinese automakers led Tesla CEO Elon Musk to warn that Chinese automakers will “demolish” global rivals without trade barriers.





• In One Key A.I. Metric, China Pulls Ahead of the U.S.: Talent: When it comes to the artificial intelligence that powers chatbots like ChatGPT, China lags behind the United States. But when it comes to producing the scientists behind a new generation of humanoid technologies, China is pulling ahead.
  
  New research shows that China has by some metrics eclipsed the United States as the biggest producer of A.I. talent, with the country generating almost half the world’s top A.I. researchers.



• Unlike India's toy design: Alibaba claims it will launch a server-grade RISC-V processor this year



• Domestic chis and operating systems: China to pivot from AMD & Intel CPUs to domestic chips in government PCs. The transition to domestic processors will advance more swiftly for server processors than for client PCs, due to the less complex software ecosystem needing replacement. China will need to invest approximately $91 billion from 2023 to 2027 to overhaul the IT infrastructure in government and adjascent industries.



• Solar cooking - From sun to plate: Despite its advantages, solar cooking has some limitations, such as longer cooking time and the need to cook outdoors in the sun.
  
  To overcome these challenges, Saswat Sourav Panda, a resident of Puri, Odisha, integrated three solar-based cooking systems at his house for different cooking processes. A solar box cooking system is used for slow cooking, a parabolic concentrator for heavy cooking and a solar glass tube-based system for cooking even without sunlight.
  
  With a total investment of Rs. 31,000, Panda reduced his annual consumption of gas cylinders from twelve to four. “Once I started to appreciate the enhanced natural taste due to slow cooking in solar, we switched entirely”.

Quick notes: AI infrastructure | KPIT battery...

• AI supercomputer: India approves a ₹10,300 Crore funding package to bolster the nation's AI infrastructure. Plans 10,000-GPU sovereign AI supercomputer



• Wafer-scale processor for AI: Cerebras launches 900,000-core 125 PetaFLOPS wafer-scale processor for AI — theoretically equivalent to about 62 Nvidia H100 GPUs



• How India is betting big on global outsourced chip play: Malaysia is a dominant player in the business in Asia, and commands 13 per cent share of the global semiconductor chip testing and packaging market.



• Malaysia's flourishing semiconductor manufacturing : The rush of foreign investments into Malaysia has come in the tunes of multi-billion dollar ambition from major industry players, like Intel. By itself, Intel will spend a whopping $7 billion on new, Malaysian chip assembly and testing facilities. The overall total of foreign Malaysian investment in 2023 was $12.8 billion, and that exceeded its seven-year combined total from 2013 to 2020.



• EU Seeks Chip Sovereignty Using RISC-V: The European Union invests heavily in initiatives to achieve chip independence using the RISC-V open-source architecture. This effort is led by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which has been a pioneer in the development of RISC-V technology.



• Ravi Pandit's sodium-ion battery: India-based KPIT has unveiled its proprietary sodium-ion battery technology with energy density of up to 170 Wh/kg. “When we started working on sodium-ion batteries, the initial expectation of energy density was quite low but over the last eight years the energy density has been going up because of the developments that we and other companies have been carrying out”.




• Cow Dung Gasification Process for Hydrogen Production: Green hydrogen can be produced from animal and human excrements and renewable energy. . . Modern Electron: This startup is converting cow manure into clean-burning hydrogen fuel.



• A Brand-New Tiny Forest: Pocket-size forests filled with native plants have been embraced worldwide for their environmental benefits. Now one is planned for New York City.



• Golden Handcuffs: Corporate roles have long enticed employees with riches – at a big cost to their personal lives. Only some workers walk away.



• Healthier alternative to traditional beer: The brewing secrets behind tastier no-alcohol beer