Wesper Named To TIME’s List of The Best Inventions of 2026 As A Special Mention

Major Korean companies including Samsung, SK and Doosan are considering participating in the acquisition of a stake in U.S. nuclear power company Westinghouse, according to industry sources. If private companies join nuclear cooperation between Korea and the United States, which has so far been led largely by state-run companies such as Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP), the move is expected to give Korean companies greater momentum in entering the U.S. nuclear power market. Government and industry sources said Wednesday that the government has been surveying nuclear power-related companies about their interest in investing in Westinghouse since announcing its investment plans in the United States. Companies interested in participating recently gathered at a meeting hosted by KEPCO to discuss potential investment options, according to the sources. Samsung C&T, SK Group, Hyundai Engineering & Construction and Doosan Enerbility were among the companies that attended the meeting. Securing a stake in Westinghouse is one of the key issues in investment

Taihan Cable & Solution, a leading power cable and energy infrastructure manufacturer, said Thursday that its U.S. subsidiary has won a turnkey extra-high-voltage grid project in the United States, capitalizing on surging power demand from artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers. Under the deal, the subsidiary, T.E.USA, will oversee local engineering, construction and other work, while the Korean headquarters will produce and supply key materials such as extra-high-voltage cables and joints. In a turnkey contract, a single company handles a project from design through construction and hands it over ready for operation. The headquarters and the U.S. unit signed a material supply contract worth about 120 billion won ($89 million), which the company disclosed in a regulatory filing Thursday. Taihan did not reveal the total value of the turnkey project or the client, citing a nondisclosure agreement. The order follows another extra-high-voltage turnkey project worth about 100 billion won that the company won in the U.S. in January. Taihan said it has won all 500-kilovolt high-voltage a

CJ OliveNetworks, the digital and technology unit of CJ Group, is branching into the travel industry with a new global membership service that enables foreign visitors in Korea to earn rewards and redeem points at participating merchants, leveraging the country's tourism boom to drive new growth. The company said Thursday that its lifestyle membership platform, CJ ONE, had introduced CJ ONE Global, allowing international visitors to sign up using only email verification, without requiring a Korean phone number or domestic identification. The launch comes as interest in Korean food, shopping and culture spreads alongside the global popularity of Korean entertainment. According to the Korea Tourism Organization, about 12.8 million foreign tourists visited Korea from January through July, up 21.3 percent from the same period last year. Once registered, members receive a mobile barcode through the CJ ONE app that they can use to earn and redeem points at participating stores, as well as access new-member and birthday benefits. The service connects visitors with businesses spanning tourism, re

Korean data center chipmaker FADU has unveiled what it calls the world’s first file-semantic solid-state drive (SSD), a storage technology designed to help artificial intelligence (AI) systems access data faster while reducing computing overhead and power consumption. The company introduced its file-semantic SSD, or FS-SSD, at the 2026 Open Compute Project Global Summit in San Jose, California, which ran from Monday to Thursday under the theme “Scaling Innovation for the AI Era.” Unlike conventional SSDs, which manage data through block addresses, FADU’s FS-SSD is designed to recognize and manage files directly, shifting tasks traditionally handled by a server’s central processing unit and operating system into the storage device itself. The technology uses FADU’s sixth-generation SSD controller, equipped with firmware that handles file searches, access permissions and file-to-address translation within the drive. By embedding file requests in standard Non-Volatile Memory Express commands, the system allows accelerators such as graphics processing units and data processing un

Korean and U.S. business leaders on Thursday called for faster regulatory approvals, tax and financial support, and visa reforms to ensure the successful implementation of major Korean investment projects in the United States. The call came in a joint declaration issued at a plenary meeting of the U.S.-Korea and Korea-U.S. Business Council, hosted by the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI), and attended by about 60 political and business leaders and experts from the two countries. Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump announced details of Seoul's planned $200 billion investment in the U.S., part of a broader $350 billion commitment agreed to by the two countries last year in exchange for lower U.S. tariffs on Korean goods. In the joint declaration, the business circles called for measures to reduce trade uncertainty and reform regulations, urging the two governments to introduce fast-track approval procedures and provide tax and financial incentives for companies participating in strategic investment projects. They also called for improvements to visa systems and the establis

Filipinos rank among the top three markets worldwide for artificial intelligence feature usage on Rakuten Viber, according to the messaging platform, with young professionals among the most active users of its AI tools. Viber Chief Product Officer Nadav Melnick said nearly 20% of the platform’s monthly active AI users in the Philippines are aged 25

Written by INQUIRER.net Tech Editor Jayvee Fernandez for Midea As a southie, I really make it a point to make my trips up north worth the drive. After discovering the MIDEA Xpress Hub was unveiling its new product line at Waltermart in North EDSA, I had to see for myself what new things MIDEA had

Alibaba Group Holding is gearing up for its annual Singles’ Day shopping festival on major online marketplaces Taobao and Tmall, with the company expecting a record one million global brands to take part this year. Pre-sales for the event open on Thursday, followed by the formal sale next Tuesday. The company projects more than 70 million products to feature, also a record for the festival. Created by Alibaba in 2009, Singles’ Day has grown into the world’s largest online shopping festival. Also...

Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek apologised and promised compensation to users after its services suffered a nearly five-hour outage on Thursday. DeepSeek will issue users a full refund for any consumption between October 8 and October 14 in the form of credits, according to a notice posted on the Hangzhou-based start-up’s application programming interface (API) platform. DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot and API services for its V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash models went offline on Thursday...

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) says he and his Senate colleagues will ask the Defense Department’s inspector general to investigate Ukraine’s sudden loss of access to the military version of Starlink, known as Starshield, which hampered Ukraine’s ability to intercept Russian drones. Tillis said the “snafu” that left Ukrainian civilian and military targets exposed now appears...

Chinese artificial intelligence lab Z.ai’s latest flagship model, GLM-5.3, may be sophisticated enough to “fake” its way through safety tests, according to a new report published Thursday, sparking new fears about the ability of artificial intelligence systems to shape their own development. The model, launched in August, showed an ability to consider how its behaviour during safety evaluations might influence how future versions of itself would be trained, according to AI safety organisation...

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) is in discussions regarding a potential role in Elon Musk’s proposed Terafab project in Texas, according to company chairman and CEO C.C. Wei, although he stressed that TSMC would retain operational control of any partner factory. The plant “has got to be run by TSMC”, Wei said during the third-quarter earnings call on Thursday. TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, has sent teams to Texas to assess expansion opportunities beyond its US hub in...