memo

Market research firm Counterpoint Research data shows that in the third quarter of 2026, major personal computer manufacturers experienced double-digit declines in sales, with HP down 31%, Dell down 25%, Lenovo down 23%, and Apple down 11%. The firm expects that personal computer shipments will decline by another 27% in the fourth quarter, with business demand being better than consumer demand, but not enough to offset the overall contraction.In terms of shipments, Lenovo shipped 15 million units, with a market share of 26.3%; HP shipped 10.3 million units; Dell shipped 7.6 million units; Apple shipped 5.6 million units, with a share of 9.8%, up from 8.7% in the same period last year, as the MacBook Neo alleviated the decline. ASUS saw a shipment decline of 7%.Counterpoint analyst Minsoo Kang stated that rising memory and component costs are pushing up system prices, causing consumers to delay upgrades. David Naranjo mentioned that the industry is undergoing structural adjustments, with component costs, system prices, and longer upgrade cycles reshaping the market. The report also stated that the increase in DRAM and NAND prices may slow down in the first half of 2027, and Micron indicated that the chip shortage may last until 2028.

According to the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated during a media interview at the GTC conference in Berlin on Thursday that the likelihood of a memory supply surplus by 2029 is low. He mentioned that one great aspect of memory is that there is always more that can be used, and he noted that HBM will continue to be applied in the coming years.Jensen Huang also stated that Nvidia is the first company in the world to introduce LPDDR memory, used in mobile phones, into data centers, which doubles its energy efficiency compared to any current global solution, thus it will continue to use this type of memory extensively. He mentioned last Thursday that customer demand for AI chip orders continues to exceed the company's supply capacity, with new orders pouring in almost weekly, if not daily.In the past week, storage chip stocks faced sell-offs due to market concerns over supply surplus and weak demand. A well-known media outlet in South Korea published a column last week, citing two experts who predicted that by 2029, there will be a significant increase in semiconductor supply, and the storage chip market may turn into a red ocean. On Thursday, the Nasdaq Composite Index closed down 2.6%, at 26008.86 points; SanDisk fell 8.51%, SK Hynix fell 8.07%, Seagate Technology fell 7.86%, Western Digital fell 6.43%, and Micron Technology fell 6.23%.

Micron Technology Vice President Li Zhe stated at the Korea Semiconductor Exhibition SEDEX 2026 held at COEX in Seoul that the company is developing Edge Inference Memory (EIM) for physical AI. The industry expects this product to enter mass production in the second half of 2028. Micron is researching the use of EIM in LPDDR6 to meet the demand for low-power DRAM in applications such as autonomous driving and humanoid robots, and is in discussions with major customers regarding related products.According to a report by the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, EIM is positioned between AI chips and memory, utilizing a method of stacking LPDDR on logic chips to process inference data at high speed, although the computing architecture has not been fully disclosed. Li Zhe mentioned that current robotic AI models have about 1 billion to 2 billion parameters, with low bandwidth requirements; however, as more advanced visual language models emerge, LPDDR alone will not suffice, and HBM will eventually be used for humanoid robots. Micron anticipates that future high-performance humanoid robots will require approximately 200 GB of DRAM and 4 TB of storage, while current service robots require about 12 GB of DRAM and 256 GB of storage.Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra stated that the storage capacity of a single humanoid robot is about 10 times that of an ordinary L2+ passenger vehicle. The storage industry may enter a period of sustained demand growth for several decades around 2030, driven by the need to synchronize data from hundreds of sensors and run large models locally for millisecond-level control. Counterpoint Research predicts that global DRAM demand for humanoid robots will increase from approximately 8,300 Tbit this year to about 172,000 Tbit by 2030.

Samsung Electronics will adopt TSMC's 3-nanometer process to produce the next generation of custom HBM chip bare dies for NVIDIA. This is the first time Samsung has collaborated with TSMC in the HBM manufacturing stage.NVIDIA has requested Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology to use TSMC's process to manufacture NVHBM bare dies and to utilize sixth-generation DRAM technology. Samsung plans to continue independently producing standard HBM and custom products for other customers.

According to news from the Anthropic official website, Anthropic announced the opening of its fifth office in the Asia-Pacific region in Singapore and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Communications and Information of Singapore. Both parties will collaborate in areas such as AI safety, model evaluation, and responsible AI adoption.Singapore is one of the most active markets for Claude globally, with over a thousand government agencies and enterprises, including GovTech Singapore, DBS, Grab, and GIC, already deploying Claude. Among them, over 1,500 engineers at GovTech Singapore have adopted Claude Code to advance the modernization of government systems, while Grab saves approximately 40,000 hours of manpower each quarter with the help of a Claude-driven sales assistant.

On October 12, the Pan-African commercial bank Ecobank signed a memorandum of understanding with the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System Co., Ltd. (CIPS) to strengthen the connectivity of RMB payments between China and Africa. The signing ceremony was held under the witness of the Minister of Finance and Budget of the Republic of Togo, coinciding with the official visit of the President of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Togo, Faure Gnassingbé, to China.Ecobank Group CEO Jeremy Awori stated that the cooperation will enhance the connectivity between the Chinese RMB payment ecosystem and Ecobank's African network, aiming to facilitate Chinese companies' access to the African market and help African companies participate more effectively in the Chinese market. China is Africa's largest trading partner, with bilateral trade expected to reach approximately $348 billion by 2025. The cooperation is anticipated to make RMB payments smoother, reduce settlement complexity, and improve the accessibility of cross-border payment channels.Ecobank has had a presence in China since 2012 and has officially opened a new office in Beijing, with Chinese business teams in West Africa, Central Africa, and East Africa, providing services such as trade financing, payments, cash management, and cross-border investments. The group's operations cover 34 countries in sub-Saharan Africa as well as France, the UK, the UAE, and China, employing over 14,000 people and serving more than 32 million customers. Recently, it has also collaborated with institutions such as Bank of China (Mauritius), XTransfer, YiBao Payment, and Wanlihui.

According to The Block, KB Kookmin Card has signed a memorandum of understanding with Japan's SBI Holdings to test AI agent-based identity verification and explore cross-border cryptocurrency payments.The two parties will study ways for Japanese tourists to pay Korean merchants using cryptocurrency assets, including stablecoins. KB Kookmin Card is a credit card company under KB Financial Group, and SBI Holdings is a Japanese financial holding group.

According to official news from Aptos, the Aptos mainnet has officially launched the Encrypted Mempool feature. Users can choose to encrypt pending transactions before block finalization, keeping the transaction call functions and input content encrypted before execution, while the sender's address and fee information remain visible to the outside.This feature is mainly aimed at institutions (to avoid exposing intentions of large orders in advance), traders (to reduce MEV arbitrage risks), and AI entities (to ensure transaction inputs remain private before execution).

Changxin Storage (CXMT), a Chinese memory chip company, announced that it has made key progress on a new storage architecture. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are also advancing similar architectures to increase storage density. The company's president, Cao Kanyu, stated at an industry event in Shanghai that Changxin Storage plans to launch new server memory products based on this architecture by the end of 2026, according to a company statement.The architecture is designed as 4F², meaning each memory cell occupies an area of 4F², where F is the minimum line width of the semiconductor. The company claims that this proprietary transistor design can improve storage density and efficiency by accommodating more memory cells on a single chip. Currently, mainstream commercial DRAM uses a 6F² cell structure.

Nasdaq-listed company AsiaStrategy (stock code: SORA) announced on October 1 that it has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with the institutional asset open financial platform Plume to explore the establishment of a joint venture aimed at investors in Asia and other markets outside the United States, focusing on the structuring, issuance, and distribution of tokenized financial products.According to the memorandum, Plume will provide tokenized infrastructure, technical capabilities, and regulatory qualifications, including registrations and licenses in several jurisdictions; AsiaStrategy and the broader Sora Ventures network will provide project initiation, distribution, and capital market channels for the Asian market, covering Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. The two parties plan to first advance products that combine mature asset classes with compliant on-chain distribution, with the product range, structure, and launch sequence still under discussion, and no products have yet been launched or offered to investors.Jason Fang, Chairman and Co-CEO of AsiaStrategy, stated that tokenization will become the default method for the issuance and holding of many financial assets, with Asia leading the way. The company is registered in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in Hong Kong, with its business having expanded from luxury watch trading to Bitcoin vault management, digital asset collateralized lending, and related financing and tokenization initiatives. Plume's flagship protocol, Plume Vaults, opens assets from institutions such as Apollo, WisdomTree, and Hamilton Lane through compliant, non-custodial vaults, with investors including Apollo Global Management, Galaxy Digital, and Brevan Howard.

Samsung Electronics announced preliminary results for the third quarter, with operating profit soaring 783% year-on-year and increasing 20.01% quarter-on-quarter, slightly exceeding analysts' expectations. The surge in demand for artificial intelligence chips has driven profit growth in the memory business.Samsung expects Q3 operating profit to be 107.4 trillion won (approximately 80.17 billion USD), with revenue of 195 trillion won, a year-on-year increase of 127%.

Tether announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the National Bank of Kazakhstan (NBK) and the Almaty City Administration (ACA), where the three parties will explore cooperation opportunities in areas such as stablecoin applications, asset tokenization, and decentralized finance.

Four-time F1 World Champion and Red Bull Racing driver Max Verstappen participated in a roundtable discussion on the main stage of TOKEN2049 in Singapore. Following this, at the invitation of Gate, he joined platform founder and CEO Dr. Han and teammate Isack Hadjar for an exclusive handprint ceremony. Previously, Max Verstappen engaged with the guests on topics related to racing performance, on-the-spot adjustments, and competition. The subsequent handprint ceremony extended the stage interaction to the Gate on-site event, becoming a special memento left by the three during TOKEN2049. After the handprint ceremony, Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar also went to the Gate Lounge to participate in a driver meet-and-greet, where they signed autographs, took photos, and interacted with guests.As the official sponsor of the F1 Red Bull Racing team, Gate continues to bring top-tier racing culture into the Web3 industry through various forms such as stage discussions, handprint commemorations, booth interactions, and driver meet-and-greets. This handprint ceremony also became a special segment in the series of interactions between Gate and the F1 Red Bull Racing team during TOKEN2049. Gate will leverage this collaboration to further expand the connection between digital assets and global sports as well as mainstream culture.

According to the Korea Economic Daily, Samsung Electronics' next-generation high-bandwidth memory "12-layer HBM4E" product has passed quality verification by Nvidia and major hyperscale data center operators.

Energy developer Fusion Source Energy (FSE) and its partners have signed a memorandum of understanding with the on-chain physical asset platform Loaf to promote the issuance of over $500 million in Australian photovoltaic and battery projects on-chain, covering more than 1,000 hectares, led by the over 200 megawatt Project Amber. According to the memorandum, the funds raised are expected to accelerate project development and expand Amber's battery capacity.Amber is a utility-scale photovoltaic park that will deploy over 200 megawatts of photovoltaic and multi-hour battery storage on-site, with an expected annual power generation sufficient to meet the electricity needs of over 70,000 households, or equivalent to the electricity demand of a 50 megawatt data center. The project pipeline also includes battery storage assets below 5 megawatts and distributed energy resources, which are modular assets closer to the electricity end, capable of forming diversified energy revenue across multiple sites in Australia.FSE CEO Weiwei Shi stated that Amber is one of the largest hybrid on-site projects in the Southern Hemisphere, which have traditionally only been open to a few institutional investors. Loaf can expand the investor base without adding extra friction and provide continuous, transparent pricing for the assets.Loaf stated that Project Amber will become a key asset in its ecosystem. As the project matures and begins trading, users will be able to go long or short and use these assets within the on-chain financial ecosystem. Loaf will participate in the on-chain trading and issuance of physical assets, allowing users to access the economic upside and returns of related infrastructure assets.

Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd has joined the MARA Foundation as the chief maintainer of Slipstream. Slipstream is MARA's private Bitcoin mempool service, and the foundation announced this appointment on Thursday. Todd will be responsible for the development and operation of this service.Slipstream allows users to send Bitcoin transactions directly to the MARA Pool without going through the public Bitcoin peer-to-peer network. Since transactions sent via Slipstream remain private before block confirmation, this service helps to conceal key information before confirmation, avoiding the exposure of public keys. The service played a role after hackers exploited a vulnerability in the Coldcard hardware wallet to steal over $115 million in user funds in July this year.MARA's Slipstream first gained attention in 2024 for releasing large Ordinals inscriptions and has recently been used in research projects such as Quantum Safe Bitcoin and Binohash. Todd is a long-time Bitcoin Core contributor, co-author of BIP 125 (replace-by-fee), creator of OpenTimestamps, and launched Libre Relay in 2024. He believes that mempool policies should follow what the market wants miners to package, rather than restricting how people use Bitcoin.

Trader degentrading (@degentradingLSD) pre-market analysis shows the following major signals in the current market:Macroeconomic Level: The 10Y yield has risen to 5.2%, and the 30Y has risen to 5.5%, approaching historical highs; the South Korean stock market opened down 2.5%, with the memory and semiconductor sectors (SK Hynix, Samsung, MU, SNDK) generally down 2% to 5%. It is expected that price movements will continue to fluctuate before MU's earnings report is released.New Cloud Computing: The investment payback period for computing projects is now less than a year, and market perceptions are changing. It is expected that the new cloud sector will undergo rapid revaluation, and the issue of power bottlenecks is also receiving increasing attention.Tech Stocks: META is weak pre-market, focusing on buying at the 690 support level or opportunities for breaking historical highs. If the large-scale data center sector breaks through as a whole, META, MSFT, and others will face paradigm-level repricing.Cryptocurrency Market: Mainstream coins and altcoins are generally weak, with BTC possibly testing the 82K support level; last week, TAO and DOGE were reduced, and CRDO was taken for profit to release risk capital. During the KBW period, crypto sentiment is usually somewhat positive, and this week's strategy focuses on finding short-term bullish opportunities.

According to official news, Tether, corporate and institutional bank Pave Bank, and the Singapore non-profit organization GFTN (Global Financial and Technology Network) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on September 24, 2026, to jointly explore the launch of the "Georgia-Singapore FinTech Scholar Program."The program aims to select outstanding STEM undergraduates from Tbilisi State University to study for one semester at Singapore Management University starting in 2027. The content will cover academic courses, industry exchanges, mentorship, and a graduation project focusing on the Georgia-Southeast Asia FinTech corridor. Participants will also have the opportunity for internships with partner organizations and access to GFTN's global knowledge network resources.Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that this collaboration aims to open global opportunities for young talent and help build a more inclusive financial future.

According to Slow Fog Security Alert, the AI memory toolchain under MemTensor has been compromised. The open-source long-term memory library MemoryOS (PyPI) aimed at LLM and AI Agent, as well as the official plugin memtensor/memos-cloud-openclaw-plugin (npm) that connects to the OpenClaw runtime, have been implanted with a cross-platform Go binary, which triggers execution when the package is loaded or imported.Affected versions include: MemoryOS==2.34 on PyPI, and npm plugins 0.1.21, 0.1.23, 0.1.25. Among them, the affected npm plugins may also cause user prompt content leakage. Slow Fog recommends taking the following measures: uninstall or downgrade to known safe versions (npm 0.1.20, PyPI 2.33); terminate the sckit process; block related infrastructure; check network activity; and rotate credentials in the affected environment.

Axios reported that allies of Trump are attacking Dario Amodei, the CEO of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, as a representative of the "doomsday" narrative surrounding artificial intelligence and one of the founders of the effective altruism movement. Sources say that during the midterm elections, allies may target Anthropic when countering his warnings about AI safety; due to his political stance and concerns about AI safety, he is seen as an easy target. This is concerning for investors as the company is preparing for an anticipated record-breaking initial public offering.The report states that a memo began circulating internally within the White House this week, attempting to portray effective altruism as a fringe, cult-like group detached from mainstream America, with Axios claiming to have obtained the document. The memo was written by a Trump political advisor not currently employed by the White House, stating that effective altruism "has established a doomsday pipeline for artificial intelligence," placing Amodei at the foundational position of the movement, while also mentioning his sister, Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic, referring to these connections as "Anthropic nodes." A source close to the government said that Amodei embodies an ideology and globalist innovation path that contradicts the president's "America First" agenda.Anthropic has been distancing itself from effective altruism. Daniela Amodei stated in a 2025 Wired report that she does not agree with the term. Dario Amodei has insisted in interviews that he is not a member of the movement and has promoted the benefits of artificial intelligence.