Tech Express | September 22, 2026

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1. DeepSeek Appoints Its First CFO as Yan Wentao Joins

Source: Mydrivers On September 22, media reports said that Yan Wentao, a partner at Hillhouse Ventures, formally joined DeepSeek on September 21 and has reported to the company, becoming the AI company's first chief financial officer and ending a three-year vacancy in the role.

Yan is expected to lead DeepSeek toward an initial public offering. DeepSeek was previously reported to have chosen CITIC Securities to prepare a listing on Shanghai's STAR Market, aiming to start the process within the year; the company raised about US$7.4 billion in June at a post-money valuation above US$50 billion, while a new funding round in July valued it at 500 billion yuan.

Public records show Yan was born in 1991 and graduated from Fudan University. Between 2013 and 2020 he worked at Tencent Investment and H Capital, and joined Hillhouse Ventures in 2020. He took part in projects involving Ke.com and ByteDance, and served as the main point of contact for the J&T investment. Reports say several other young partners from leading venture firms competed for the role over the past two months, with Yan ultimately winning out.

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2. Tencent Releases Hy Image3.5 Preview, Priced at 0.15 Yuan per 2K Image

Source: Mydrivers On September 22, Tencent Hunyuan officially released the Hunyuan Image 3.5 preview (Hy Image3.5 preview), offering a cost-effective image-generation model for professional-grade creation. The model supports text-to-image, image-to-image and multi-turn conversational creation, accepts up to five reference images at once, and outputs up to 2K resolution.

Tencent said blind tests by hundreds of in-house professional designers found the new model about 30% better than its predecessor Hy Image3.0, on par with Seedream 5.0 pro and slightly better than Nano-Banana Pro and Qwen-Image-3.0 Pro. On pricing, Hy Image3.5 preview costs 0.15 yuan per 2K image on the Tencent Cloud API and US$0.024 per image internationally, charging only for output images.

The model went into gray-scale testing in the Yuanbao app two months earlier, lifting users' overall image-generation requests by more than 50%. It is now available across Tencent AI assistant Yuanbao, the film platform WorkRally, the production tool OnSolo, the creative agent Miora and other native apps, and is integrated with Tencent Cloud's media processing (MPS) and VOD services; Miora, WorkRally and OnSolo will be free to try for two weeks.

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3. Jensen Huang Dismisses 'Doomsday Narrative' of AI Causing Human Extinction

Source: BBC Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described warnings that artificial intelligence could lead to human extinction within the next decade as a “doomsday narrative.” In an interview with CBS, the BBC's US partner, he said: “2030 will not be the end of the world. The probability of 2030 being the end of the world is 0%.”

In recent weeks, researchers have raised warnings about the technology's risks, heating up the AI-safety debate as some industry leaders call for slowing model development. Earlier, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said on social media that AI developers believe the technology “could kill all of us before the decade is out,” sparking discussion.

Huang said such predictions are “not based on science,” and argued that AI companies talking about “slowing down” may be seeking exemptions from legal liability for harm their products might cause. His remarks come as the US and China engage frequently on AI: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng met in New York on September 20, while a summit between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping is expected later this week in Washington.

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4. MediaTek's Flagship Laptop Chip Is the Dimensity CX C10 Max, Debuting in a Lenovo Googlebook

Source: 9to5Google The first batch of Googlebook laptops launched with either Intel or Qualcomm chips, but MediaTek has confirmed it will also back the platform. The company unveiled its flagship laptop chip, the Dimensity CX C10 Max, which it says will appear in an upcoming Lenovo Googlebook.

Following Qualcomm's recent push with the Snapdragon X line, MediaTek is introducing its CX line of “Compute Experiences” chips. The first, the Dimensity CX C10 Max, is built on TSMC's 3nm process with an octa-core All Big Core design (one Cortex-X925, three Cortex-X4, four Cortex-A720), an 11-core GPU and a dedicated NPU, enabling fanless designs.

MediaTek says the chip delivers 55 TOPS for AI tasks and supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0 (though not on Googlebooks). In an email to 9to5Google, the company said the C10 Max will debut in an upcoming Lenovo Googlebook product; the first 15-inch Lenovo Googlebook is powered by Intel.

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5. Alibaba's Yitian CPUs to Adopt In-House Cores, Single-Core Performance Up 40%

Source: Mydrivers On September 22 at the Apsara Conference, Alibaba unveiled a series of large-model and chip roadmaps: its Qwen models will reach 8 to 10 trillion parameters, and the Zhenwu V900 AI chip delivers three times the performance of its predecessor. Its in-house CPU line, Yitian, drew particular attention.

Alibaba began developing in-house Arm server CPUs in 2019 and released the Yitian 710 in 2021, with up to 128 cores, eight-channel DDR5, a 5nm process and PCIe 5.0 support. Under the latest plan, the next-generation Yitian 720 will launch in the third quarter of 2027 with a 192-core design and 96 PCIe lanes, targeting throughput- and concurrency-heavy workloads.

Also set for Q3 2027, the Yitian 730 will move to Alibaba's first generation of in-house high-performance cores (the Yitian line had used Arm's Neoverse server IP cores), supporting two-way simultaneous multithreading (SMT) with single-core performance up to 1.4 times the previous generation. Beyond that, Alibaba will skip the name “Yitian 740” and launch the Yitian 750 with second-generation in-house cores and native support for T-Head's Icicle interface; from the 720 onward, Alibaba's CPUs will also be deployed in the Pangu supernode.

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6. iOS 27.2 Beta 2 Reveals New Details of Unannounced iPhone Anti-Snatching Feature

Source: 9to5Mac Apple is continuing to develop a feature that automatically locks an iPhone when it detects the device has been snatched from its owner's hand. New references in iOS 27.2 beta 2 show the company is still actively developing it, even though it has not been officially announced.

According to code seen by 9to5Mac, the feature is called “AutoLock” internally. Alongside the signals used to judge whether a phone may have been taken, the new references include safeguards against false positives, such as successful biometric authentication, certain foreground app activities that could otherwise be misread, and a backoff mechanism that temporarily suppresses further automatic locks after repeated lock events.

The code also suggests AutoLock uses a voting system in which a potential theft signal can request a lock, while safeguards such as biometrics, familiar locations or certain app activities can veto it. The feature remains under development and is not enabled in iOS 27.2 beta 2; Apple has enabled the underlying AutoLock service in the background while keeping the component that actually locks the phone disabled.

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7. Global TWS Earbud Shipments Fall for the First Time in Over Three Years, China a Drag

Source: Mydrivers On September 22, research firm Omdia released a report showing global TWS earbud shipments in the second quarter of 2026 reached 82.1 million units, down 0.7% year-on-year — the first overall decline since the second quarter of 2023, more than three years ago.

As the world's largest TWS consumer market, mainland China was the main drag, with Q2 shipments falling 9.5% year-on-year. The report attributes this to consumer-electronics stimulus in 2025 that pulled forward many upgrade purchases; as that boost faded in 2026, upgrade willingness dropped. US and Indian shipments also declined, with only some emerging markets growing.

Sub-segments diverge sharply: traditional in-ear and half-in-ear TWS fell 2%, while open-ear (OWS) earbuds rose against the trend, shipping 11.1 million units in the quarter, up 12% year-on-year, lifting their share to 13.5%. By brand, Apple held first place with 20.5%, followed by Xiaomi, then Samsung, Huawei and OPPO. As ordinary TWS become ubiquitous and upgrade cycles lengthen, vendors are pivoting to open-ear models, though leakage and audio-quality shortcomings remain.

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8. Lunar Orbiter Spots 'Once-in-a-Lifetime' New Crater on the Moon

Source: CNN The moon's surface had a violent encounter with a comet or asteroid — and bears a massive “scar” to prove it. The space rock, estimated to be the size of a building three to six stories tall, slammed into the moon's eastern edge about two years ago, between April 11 and May 22, 2024, though researchers did not notice it at the time.

The impact left a crater about 728 feet (222 meters) wide and 141 feet (43 meters) deep. Scientists say it is the largest newly formed crater found in the solar system since humans began monitoring such features, with the study published in the journal Science Advances. The authors noted that an impact of this magnitude is expected only once every 132 years on the moon — “a statistically rare, effectively once-in-a-lifetime observation.”

The team named the feature McGetchin Crater after the late Apollo-era lunar scientist Dr. Thomas McGetchin. The discovery relied on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has circled the moon for more than 17 years; researcher Robert Wagner spotted it on October 24, 2025, while comparing before-and-after images. Thermal data also showed a region about four miles wide around the crater that is roughly 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than the surrounding area.

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9. Jensen Huang to Attend US-China Leaders' State Dinner on September 24

Source: Mydrivers On September 22, reports said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has confirmed he will attend a state dinner between the leaders of the US and China, scheduled for September 24. The dinner's tech lineup is star-studded: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Apple executive chairman Tim Cook, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon were also invited.

Huang's attendance draws attention because of the special role Nvidia's GPUs play in the US-China tech contest. It was previously reported that the US Commerce Department approved about 10 Chinese companies to buy Nvidia H200 chips, capped at 75,000 units each; but as of mid-2026, actual deliveries of the approved H200s stood at zero.

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick acknowledged at a congressional hearing that China hopes to concentrate investment in its domestic industry and has held off buying American AI chips. Huang's own stance on export controls has shifted: he once called the controls a “loser's mentality,” but in May he said China “should not get Nvidia's most advanced, highest-end AI GPUs,” including the Blackwell and future Rubin series.

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10. Alibaba's Qwen Lands on Honor Flagships; Magic9 and Robot Phone to Ship Qwen Intelligence First

Source: Mydrivers On September 22 at the 2026 Apsara Conference, it was announced that Honor's new Magic9 series, set to launch on September 28, will be among the first official devices to ship Alibaba's AI phone solution, Qwen Intelligence. The world's first robot phone, Honor's Robot Phone, will support it as well.

The two sides built vertical-domain models and solutions for next-generation AI phones on the basis of Qwen Intelligence and Honor's MagicOS. Based on this solution, overall task accuracy reaches 91.8%, GUI operation takes just 3.6 seconds, complex long-horizon tasks can involve more than 100 operation steps, and the end-to-end service completion rate exceeds 90%.

As the industry's first robot phone, Honor's Robot Phone debuts a titanium-alloy dexterous gimbal, bringing robot-level mechanical freedom to a phone for the first time. The gimbal system integrates more than 100 precision parts, applies over 60 precision processes, and draws on more than 100 in-house patents.

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