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AI News Flash: Huawei announced on Monday that rival Qualcomm will pay to use its patents for the first time, as the two companies reached a cross-licensing agreement covering 5G and AI technology. The deal marks a major breakthrough for the Chinese company’s IP portfolio, though it still needs to clear review by US regulators before taking effect. Qualcomm first started paying to license some of Huawei’s patented technology back in 2001, and this new cross-licensing deal, once approved, would make Qualcomm a ’net payer’ in this patent relationship for the first time - meaning Qualcomm would pay Huawei more in licensing fees than Huawei pays Qualcomm.

AI news brief: Japanese stocks surged in early Monday trading on AI optimism, with the Nikkei breaking through the 70,000 mark intraday for the first time in three months. Tech stocks led the rally, pushing Tokyo markets to a three-month intraday high. The main trigger for the shift in sentiment was US labor market data: the September US nonfarm payrolls report showed job growth coming in below market expectations, leading investors to scale back bets on a Fed rate hike this month.

AI News Brief: The lesson from the atomic bombings is that humanity took decades to build arms control mechanisms in the nuclear age, while AI is advancing far faster, leaving a much shorter window for governance. US President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed at their September 24 summit to further discuss AI risk controls, showing both leaders recognize the urgency of the issue. However, the original summary doesn’t provide specifics on the governance mechanisms or discussion details — see the source link for more.

AI news brief: Kawasaki Heavy Industries plans to launch a fully autonomous humanoid robot by 2030, powered by a domestically developed ‘physical AI’ platform. The company has been developing its Kaleido humanoid robot since 2015, and the Kaleido android will integrate the platform technology being developed by Noetra to achieve fully autonomous operation. The original summary is brief and doesn’t provide further details on technical specs, mass production timeline, or commercialization — see the source link for more.

AI News Brief: Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said in a recent interview that the platform is unlikely to let external AI agents like Meta’s Muse complete bookings directly on Airbnb. His reasoning is that ‘planning travel is itself a form of entertainment’ — the process of searching, comparing, and deciding has independent value for consumers, and letting an AI agent automate the entire booking flow would mean skipping that experience.

AI News Flash: Major hard drive makers in Taiwan are ramping up component production to meet the surge in data storage demand driven by the AI boom. Japanese electronics component suppliers like Resonac Holdings and TDK are direct beneficiaries of this AI-driven hard drive demand wave, thanks to product lines spanning a broad range of advanced technologies. The report notes that Japan’s hard drive component industry once faced decline pressure from a shrinking market, but is now ramping production back up as AI applications drive a rapid rise in demand for large-scale data storage.

AI news brief: TEPCO and other Japanese power companies are tightening data center power rules to curb ‘capacity squatting’ — where operators reserve huge amounts of power capacity in advance but end up using far less than they applied for, leaving that capacity sitting idle and wasted. The report notes that as the AI data center building boom surges, Japanese utilities and regulators are facing massive, hard-to-predict power demand: many data center projects get delayed, relocate, or…

AI news flash: Japanese legal tech firm Legalscape has announced a partnership with US legal AI developer Harvey AI, integrating its proprietary Japanese legal research tools into the Harvey AI platform. Legalscape’s AI research tools draw not just on publicly available information but also on data from professional legal publications, deepening its expertise in Japanese legal search and analysis. This…

AI News Brief: Toshiba plans to double its hard disk drive (HDD) production capacity for AI data centers by fiscal year 2027 to meet the surging demand for data storage driven by the AI boom. The expansion will take place at its Philippines plant, marking Toshiba’s first major investment in its HDD business in about five years, signaling the company’s long-term confidence in AI infrastructure storage demand. The expansion includes boosting the storage capacity of individual drives to handle the massive data throughput and storage needs of AI chip training…

AI News Brief: Robert Alan Feldman, senior advisor at Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities, points to three keys to making AI actually benefit workers—curbing monopolies, creating new demand, and helping workers reskill. The original brief is short on specifics and implementation details, so check the source link for more. It’s paired with a background image: Japan’s GMO AI…