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According to reports from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, humanoid intelligence company Current Robotics has publicly disclosed its financing progress for the first time: the company has completed seed round, angel round, and Pre-A round financing, with a total financing amount of hundreds of millions of RMB. The company's investors include financial investment institutions such as BV Baidu Ventures, Hillhouse Capital, Oasis Capital, Monolith Capital, Qianhai Ark, Fosun Wealth, Junshan Capital, as well as industry players like Zhiyuan Robotics, Xinghai Map, and Jike Technology.The financing funds will mainly be used to promote the large-scale collection of human body data, with a focus on investing in the research and development of core technologies such as full-body dexterous operation models and interactive world models.

On August 20, Binji Pande, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, tweeted that he will join the nonprofit Ethereum development lab Ethlabs as a founding member to promote the development of Ethereum.

According to Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) warned in an internal memo to top AI companies that the negative public perception of data centers in the U.S. is harming the party's chances of retaining a key Senate seat in Ohio. The memo pointed out that Democrats have made data centers a core issue in defeating Republican Senator Jon Husted, and it has been effective, stating that if he loses and blames it on data centers, politicians nationwide will avoid future projects, making this issue a potential focal point of the current election cycle.The memo, titled "Ohio Data Center Risks," urges AI companies to improve perceptions by explaining "who benefits, who pays, and why the community should welcome" them. Currently, over 4,000 data centers are operating across the U.S., with more than 3,000 under construction or planned to support AI development. However, they are facing protests due to high electricity and water consumption, rising utility costs, limited job opportunities, and concerns about AI job displacement. Internal polling shows their unpopularity is close to that of nuclear waste and has become a proxy indicator of sentiment towards AI.Husted's opponent, former Senator Sherrod Brown, has invested millions in advertising, calling him the "Ohio data center spokesperson." A Fox News poll shows Brown leading by 8 percentage points. Republicans hope that AI companies can curb the backlash; otherwise, Husted's defeat will cause lasting damage to data center development nationwide. Democrats are also acting based on polling, with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signing an executive order imposing strict restrictions on data center development.

According to a report by the Korean News Agency, global virtual asset infrastructure company BitGo announced that its Korean entity BitGo Korea has received acceptance of its VASP (Virtual Asset Service Provider) registration application from the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of Korea on August 18, becoming the first foreign cryptocurrency corporate entity to complete VASP registration directly in Korea.BitGo Korea was established in 2024, and this time chose to directly meet regulatory requirements to enter the market, rather than adopting the industry norm of acquiring existing VASP companies. Subsequently, it will use this as a foundation to officially launch virtual asset custody and transfer services in Korea, focusing on expanding business towards financial institutions and corporate clients.

According to Gate market data, Samsung Electronics' increase has expanded to 10%, with news that the company will announce a trillion won shareholder return plan.

Arthur Hayes published an article "The Book of Genesis," using mythological narrative to explain the core concepts and tokenomics of his AI/crypto project Flop Labs. He pointed out that the current AI market lacks a unified pricing standard for computing power, with different models defining and pricing "tokens" differently.Hayes proposed building a decentralized computing power network Flop Network, with FLOP as the native token, representing a direct claim to computing power (FLOPs), allowing AI agents and humans to trade at a globally unified price per computing power. The FLOP token economy adopts a fair launch model, with the team self-funding and no pre-sale. Miners earn FLOP block rewards and inference fees by providing "Proof of Useful Inference" (PoUI), and AI agents can use $FLOP to purchase computing power ("food") and combine it with decentralized storage to achieve persistent memory ("personality"). Testnet participants will receive about 20% of the token supply (distributed over ten years). Hayes stated that if the AI agent economy predictions come true, the value of Flop Network could far exceed that of Bitcoin.

According to crypto journalist Eleanor Terrett, sources revealed that before President Trump and crypto industry leaders spoke at the White House, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, a16z's Chris Dixon, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and Kraken co-founder Arjun Sethi met with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. The discussion focused on the importance of the Clarity Act and its implications for U.S. jobs, economic growth, and attracting crypto businesses back.Participants also discussed the remaining obstacles to the passage of the bill, including issues related to ethical clauses, and how the White House could help facilitate a bipartisan consensus.

According to the Industrial and Commercial Times, driven by the long-term growth in demand for memory and advanced packaging due to AI, Winbond Electronics has proactively initiated expansion plans for its Kaohsiung Luzhu plant, merging the originally planned phases two and three into Module B for simultaneous development. Construction of the cleanroom is expected to start in 2027, with equipment installation beginning as early as the beginning of 2029, and equipment will be phased in according to customer demand forecasts and LTA. Currently, there are already customers negotiating for capacity in 2029 and 2030.Industry sources indicate that Winbond's niche DRAM and SLC NAND are in short supply in the third quarter, with a quarterly price increase estimated at about 50%; NOR Flash benefits from large cloud service provider customers stocking up, with a quarterly price increase estimated at about 30%. The price increase for memory in the fourth quarter is expected to converge to 2% to 5%, but thanks to increased DRAM capacity and growing shipment volumes, revenue and profits can still maintain a quarterly increase. Winbond's consolidated revenue in the second quarter was NT$59.843 billion, a quarterly increase of 56.4% and a year-on-year increase of 184.7%. DRAM prices increased by about 100% quarter-on-quarter, while Flash rose by about 43%, with consolidated gross margin rising to 66.2% and after-tax earnings per share of NT$5.40.The Module B product plan includes Standard DRAM, CUBE DRAM, Wafer-on-Wafer (WoW), and silicon capacitors (Si-Cap), which will support 14-nanometer and future 12-nanometer DRAM processes, with plans to introduce EUV equipment in the future.

BitcoinTreasuries.NET posted on platform X that the Japanese listed company Remixpoint (3825.T) has increased its holdings by 9.96 bitcoins, bringing its total holdings to 1501.27 bitcoins, ranking 38th in the Bitcoin 100 list.

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Frier stated that OpenAI plans to become a publicly traded company by 2027, but may go public earlier if business growth accelerates. Frier mentioned that the IPO is a milestone and a means of financing. In March of this year, the company completed a $122 billion financing round, providing greater flexibility for future development.

The Federal Reserve meeting minutes show that participants believe the labor market conditions are stable and supply and demand are balanced. Some participants pointed out that signs of weakness in the labor market still exist, including low employment rates and high long-term unemployment rates.The demand for technical workers in AI-related industries is strong, and wages have risen significantly. Overall nominal wage growth is moderate, but there are upward risks for future wage growth.

According to Bloomberg, Prosus NV plans to invest $100 million in Indian fintech company Navi Ltd., marking Navi's first introduction of institutional capital. This round of investment requires regulatory approval, including from the Competition Commission of India, to be completed.Navi is headquartered in Bangalore and operates in payments, credit, insurance, and mutual funds. Its UPI payment application ranked fourth in India by scale for the fiscal year ending in March; its subsidiary Navi Finserv has surpassed an asset management scale of approximately 130 billion rupees.

According to CNBC, Nvidia (NVDA.O) is seeking to collaborate with companies to expand its business in the Nordic region.

According to Newsroom, PayPal and Venmo are expanding into the tuition payment sector through a new integration service, partnering with three major education payment platforms.

Glassnode stated that the spot price of Bitcoin has fallen below the comprehensive cost basis of publicly disclosed Bitcoin reserve companies, with the proportion of companies in a loss state rising to about 80%.

According to Gate market data, Moderna's pre-market increase has expanded to 30%.

According to the Dong-A Ilbo, Samsung Electronics plans to expand the core project of the P5 1·2 factory (Fab 5·6) in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, from a dual-layer wafer factory to a three-layer wafer factory to respond to the global artificial intelligence semiconductor and memory supercycle and maximize production capacity. Samsung Electronics has recently submitted a plan to change the industrial park, proposing to increase the floor area ratio from 350% to a maximum of 490%. This change must be reviewed by the Gyeonggi Province governor and approved by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport's industrial site policy review committee before it can be finalized.The Pyeongtaek P5 1·2 factory is the largest semiconductor factory in the world under a single standard, which began construction in 2022 and aims to be completed by 2030. It will produce high bandwidth memory (HBM), high-end DRAM, next-generation V-NAND, and advanced foundry products. The currently operational Pyeongtaek P4 uses a dual-layer structure with four clean rooms in a single building; if the change is approved, P5 will be configured with up to six clean rooms, and the number of clean rooms and production capacity is expected to increase by about 1.5 times. SK Hynix also plans to use a three-layer structure for all newly constructed wafer factories in the Yongin semiconductor cluster.Market research firm Counterpoint Research expects the global memory market size to increase from approximately 360 trillion won last year to 1,500 trillion won this year and 2,100 trillion won next year. In the context of increasingly difficult access to electricity, water, and land, increasing the floor area ratio to build three-layer wafer factories has become an important path to overcome the physical limitations of limited space and rely on the existing semiconductor industry ecosystem.

SK Hynix will implement a share buyback and cancellation plan worth 40 trillion won (approximately 28.5 billion USD) starting from August 20, repurchasing about 24.07 million shares, which accounts for approximately 3.3% of the total outstanding shares. Based on the previous day's closing price of 1.662 million won per share, this represents about 58% of its net cash of 69 trillion won as of the end of the second quarter. The buyback will last for about three months, and all repurchased shares will be completely canceled. This is also the largest stock cancellation plan ever by a listed company in South Korea.According to the shareholder return policy previously disclosed by the company, SK Hynix plans to use more than 50% of the cumulative free cash flow from 2025 to 2027 for returns, implementing buybacks and cash dividends concurrently, and is studying the expansion of the dividend plan. The company stated that this early buyback is based on the judgment that "the stock price is below intrinsic value" to achieve efficient capital reallocation. Specific additional return plans, including dividends and stock buybacks, will be announced after a board resolution during the third quarter earnings release.

AI chip startup Etched recently completed a $700 million financing round at a valuation of $21 billion, but its technology claims are facing industry skepticism. The well-known hacker George Hotz's AI computing team, the tiny corp, publicly criticized Etched's marketing approach: there are many investors, orders, and hardware photos, but there is too little third-party data to truly verify performance.Etched's core selling point is LVI (Low Voltage Inference) technology, claiming it allows trillion-parameter sparse MoE chips to run at over 80% of theoretical peak computing power (MFU). Chip design professional Wesley Yue raised technical doubts about this: high MFU does not necessarily represent absolute performance—if the chip's peak computing power is low, even with an 80% utilization rate, actual performance may still lag behind competitors. Yue believes that Etched's design "does not make sense from first principles" and may be a result of repackaging after its early Transformer ASIC faced power consumption issues.Etched has not yet disclosed complete computing power, power consumption, and third-party benchmark data; the official website only states that "early customer tests have reached leading levels," and detailed performance data will be "released later." There is currently no evidence to prove that Etched is fraudulent. Etched has not publicly responded to this matter.