AI payment infrastructure Kite launches Marathon, an adaptive inference infrastructure for long-running AI Agents.

According to Bitget market data, South Korea’s KOSPI index fell in midday trading, with its daily gain narrowing to 3% and currently trading at 6952.26 points. SK Hynix is up 13.75%, while Samsung is up 3.86%.

According to Bitget market data, Hong Kong-listed large language model (LLM) stocks have weakened, with MINIMAX-W (00100.HK) falling more than 9% and Zhipu (02513.HK) dropping over 3%.

According to CNBC, driven by the Trump administration’s push to repatriate advanced chip manufacturing to the United States, global leading wafer foundry TSMC stated that its overseas capacity expansion is driving up production costs and will continue to weigh on the company’s profit margins over the next several years. Since Trump returned to the White House in 2025, TSMC has announced a total of $200 billion in U.S. investments, including the newly unveiled $100 billion advanced semiconductor manufacturing and advanced packaging project. The White House noted that these investments are outcomes of Trump’s trade and industrial policies. TSMC’s second-quarter net profit rose 77.4% year-over-year, hitting another all-time high, with a gross margin of 67.7%—up from 66.2% in the first quarter. However, Chief Financial Officer Huang Renzhao said the launch of overseas fabrication plants (fabs) will continue to dilute gross margins, projecting an initial gross margin pressure of 2 to 3 percentage points in the coming years, which could expand to 3 to 4 percentage points later. Morningstar analysts estimate that chip production costs in the U.S. are 20% to 50% higher than in Taiwan, China, depending on factors such as subsidies, tax credits, and other cost elements. The market widely expects TSMC to pass part of the costs to customers via price increases. Earlier media reports said TSMC plans to raise its advanced and mature process foundry prices by up to 10% in 2027. Analysts pointed out that despite higher onshore U.S. construction costs, driven by growing AI demand, supply chain diversification, and U.S. industrial policies, TSMC will continue to expand its U.S. capacity layout. Leveraging its leading position in advanced process technology, the company boasts strong cost-shifting capabilities.

Binance announced it will perform wallet maintenance on the TRON (TRX) network at 06:00 UTC on July 23 (14:00 Beijing Time). To facilitate the maintenance, TRON (TRX) network deposit and withdrawal services will be suspended starting at 05:55 UTC on July 23 (13:55 Beijing Time). The maintenance is expected to last approximately one hour; services will resume once the network stabilizes, with no additional announcement required. The exchange noted that this wallet maintenance will not impact spot trading of TRON-related tokens, all technical work will be handled by the platform, and users do not need to take any action.

According to Farside's monitoring, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded a net inflow of $203.2 million yesterday, marking six consecutive trading days of net inflows. Among them, IBIT saw a net inflow of $163.9 million, FBTC $23.1 million, ARKB $9.7 million, and Grayscale Bitcoin Trust $6.5 million.

SoftBank Group announced Wednesday it will launch a new information platform called GaranAI, which will source article data from news agencies and publishers and process it into data usable for generative AI. Content creators including Jiji Press, Sankei Shimbun, Kyodo News, and some local newspapers will provide content to GaranAI in exchange for compensation. SoftBank will convert the content into a data format that prevents easy restoration of its original form, further process it into AI-friendly data, then sell the processed data to AI developers to help improve the accuracy of AI responses to user queries. SoftBank released a trial version of the platform on Wednesday and began accepting applications from AI developers. The operator plans to keep refining the platform over the next six months and launch the official version in or after January next year. The company also plans to expand the platform to accept copyrighted content from a wider range of fields. (Jinshi)